Two young children are believed to have frozen to death early Monday morning, months after their mother pleaded for help.
The unidentified two and nine-year-old had been living in a van with their mother, siblings, grandmother and their grandmother’s child for at least two months when they suddenly stopped breathing, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Police said at a news conference on Tuesday that the van pulled into the ninth floor of the parking garage for Hollywood Casino at around 1am, but at some point over the course of the night, the vehicle ran out of the gas.
The children’s 29-year-old mother then called a ‘close relative,’ whom Fox 2 reports is the nine-year-old’s godmother, for help.
‘When the mother realized that her son wasn’t breathing, she did make a 911 call,’ Interim Police Chief Todd Bettison said.
Then, when the friend arrived at the scene, she immediately used her car to take the nine-year-old to Children’s Hospital of Michigan.
While they were en route to the hospital, the mother also realized that her two-year-old was also not breathing, and when her friend came back, the ‘entire family’ got into the vehicle and rushed to the hospital.
There, both the nine year old and the two year old ‘were pronounced dead, with the early indicator being that they froze to death,’ Detroit Police Captain Nathan Duda told NBC News.
Two young children are believed to have frozen to death early Monday morning inside the parking garage for Hollywood Casino
The family had been living in a van for a couple of months, and had parked it on the ninth floor of the parking lot when it ran out of gas
Temperatures were around 12 degrees Fahrenheit at the time, with a wind chill of six degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
The other three children, who range in age from four to 13, were also being treated at the hospital, but were in stable condition.
They are now in the care of other family members, as authorities investigate the children’s deaths, according to NBC News.
Their mother and grandmother were brought in for questioning and provided a statement, but nobody is in custody at the time.
‘It has to be [investigated] Duda said.
‘I don’t think anyone really wants to think about that at the moment with the two children passed, but the reality is that the circumstances have to be examined.
‘We have to figure out how to go forward.’
But it was also revealed at the news conference that the children’s mother had sought help from the city’s homeless resources.
Both children were rushed to Children’s Hospital of Michigan, where they were pronounced dead
Mayor Mike Duggan said that the family had reached out to the city’s ‘homeless response team’ multiple times, most recently on November 25.
They had been living with a family at the time, but said they could no longer stay there and they needed a place to go.
‘In the course of that conversation, there was no resolution reached,’ the mayor said.
‘As far as we’ve been able to determine so far, the family never called back again for service.’
He added that ‘for whatever reason, this wasn’t deemed an emergency that caused an outreach worker to visit the family.’
It seems that from there, the family started living in the van, and would move stay at various casino parking lots, which the police say they believe the family sought out for safety and so that they could use the casino’s bathrooms.
But just weeks after the mother spoke to the homeless response team, a shelter opened up nearby.
‘[It] brings home the point that having services available doesn’t mean very much if the residents who need them don’t know how to access them,’ Duggan said.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is now calling for a review of the city’s services for homelessness, the city’s homeless call center and ways to make the services more accessible
He is now calling for a review of the city’s services for homelessness, the city’s homeless call center and ways to make the services more accessible, according to the Detroit News.
‘We have to make sure that we do everything possible to make sure this doesn’t happen again,’ Duggan said.
‘I’m not trying to talk about an individual employee. I’m talking about the system as a whole. Are we doing everything to make sure people in the city know how to access this critical care?’
He tasked Deputy Mayor Melia Howard and the city’s housing department to determine what went wrong in this case and what is needed to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.
A report is now due in two weeks.
‘The full strength of this administration is behind this effort,’ Howard vowed.
‘No parent, no family, no mother should ever have to endure such hardships and heartbreak.
‘As Detroiters, I know that we will lift them up in our hearts.’
The mother, though, is now said to be lost without her children.
Detroit Board of Police Commissioner Tamara Liberty Smith, who also serves as director of Detroit Power Detroit Community Outreach, told the Free Press she saw the mother ask God why He didn’t take her instead.
‘They’re a family that’s trying. They don’t want to abandon each other,’ she said, adding that the mom was due to start an auto-related job in Flint on Wednesday.
‘They weren’t expecting a tragedy like this.’
