Three young children – two of them covered in faeces and left for several hours in a locked room – were rescued from a flat so filthy police had to wear hazmat suits.
Parents Parents Aubrianna Freeman, 22, and Dakota Dodd, 24, were arrested for child neglect after the shocking discovery in Oklahoma City in the US.
Neighbour Barbara North alerted police on September 12, after spotting two young boys naked in an upstairs window, possibly in distress.
‘I’d go by that window and see them little boys naked in it,’ Ms Northtold News 9. ‘They looked up at me as if to say “help me.”
‘They would have dookie all over their face, hands, mouths,’ she said.
When police arrived they were overwhelmed by the smell of faeces and urine in the property, according to an affidavit obtained by Law & Crime.
‘Once the door opened, I was struck with a smell that made my stomach turn and my eyes water,’ an officer wrote.
The affidavit said that Dodd, the boys’ step dad and biological father to Freeman’s baby girl, answered the door at around 11.15am.
He still appeared to have ‘redness and marks’ on his face as if he had just been woken up from sleeping, police said.
Dodd initially told officers he was the only one home, but then admitted the two boys were upstairs and reluctantly took them to their room.
Describing what he saw, one officer wrote: ‘On the stairs leading up to the second floor, there were piles of what appeared to be human feces. The smell of feces got stronger as you walked up the stairs,’ the cop wrote.
‘At the top of the stairs was a bedroom. The room had no furniture, aside from a child’s plastic slide and a few toys.
‘Located in the closet was a twin-size bedframe. The frame was standing on its end and did not have a mattress.’
The affidavit said there were faeces on every surface, including walls, floors and windows.
As police opened the bedroom door, the boys, aged three and four, came out straight away ‘as if they had been standing at the door waiting or trying to get out’.
The children had ‘faeces caked in their fingernail beds, palms of their hands, feet, legs and faces,’ the affidavit noted.
It also said the faeces were dried and did not appear to be fresh.
When crime scene investigators looked around the flat they wore hazmat suits to protect themselves from the smell.
News 9 reports that Dodd later told officers he locked the young boys in the bedroom for more than 12 hours at a time so Freeman could get enough sleep to ‘keep the kids safe’ due to the neighborhood.
The couple’s 11-month-old daughter was also found inside the home – but had been kept away from the boys.
All three children were taken to a local hospital to be checked out, before being placed in Department of Human Services care.
Dodd and Freeman, meanwhile, were taken into custody and charged with five counts each of child neglect.
Their bonds were set at $250,000 each.