Children Lived Among Roaches And Bedbugs

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

A couple was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, after police discovered 4 children under the age of 7 living in their home among bedbugs, roaches, feces and trash, local sources confirm.

Sean Landrey, 38, and Jessica Downs, 31, were detained after an unnamed source called authorities requesting that they check the home of a 7-year-old girl who had come to school with her lip cut, reportedly in the couple's arrest report.

This is how police officers went to the house located in the 5400 block of Tracy Way in the Hazelwood neighborhood to do a search. There they found the 4 children living in "horrendous" conditions among "an enormous amount of rubble and garbage outside the residence" and furniture that had roaches and cockroach feces in them, according to documents obtained by the WDRB station in Kentucky..

In one of the rooms, the police found a 4-year-old boy and a 5-year-old boy in an extremely small bed for his age. In the next bed the 7-year-old girl slept. The three were "between roaches and bedbugs" and were wearing dirty clothes. In another room they found a 2-year-old baby in a crib with "hundreds of roaches in the crib" with him. When he was lifted from the crib there was a roach on the back of his head. Insects were also present on the walls of the home, electrical appliances, and the structure of the home.

Following the discovery, police arrested Landrey, who is the biological father of one of the children, and Downs, who lives in the same home. The children were removed from the home and temporarily placed under the care of one of their grandmothers.

“Those children were not dirty. They were not disgusting,”said Robert Ralph, Landrey's uncle and landlord, to WDRB, who assures that the couple has lived with him for years and that he does not believe that the dirt in the house is as bad as the police paint it.. "It wasn't that dirty. It was just under the furniture [that there were roaches],”the man continued. "Yes there are, I admit, roaches." The man assures that the couple moved with him because they had nowhere to go and that the infestation began when they settled in their home.

"This subpoena is (…) very, very disturbing," said Judge Amber Wolf, addressing Landrey and Downs during their appearance in court this Friday. The couple faces charges of second-degree criminal abuse and threatening the welfare of a minor. Both remain locked up in a Louisville Metro jail on $ 10,000 bail.