thread starter ilikesuushi Jul 21 2009
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| I can't post the URL so ill just copy and paste it here Warning: Wall of text Part One: The Feral Child PLANT CITY � The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window. A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered. Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard. The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost. The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away. Months went by. The face never reappeared. Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house � and one stumbled back out. Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds. Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police. They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families. "Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen." The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room. "I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces � dog, cat and human excrement � smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting." Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters. The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches. "It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!" While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . . The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark. At his feet, something stirred. � � � First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him. She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm |
