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Boy Found Dead in New Jersey Basement
Filed 5 January 2003 at 8:54 p.m. ET
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- Police hunted for a go-go dancer Monday after a 7-year-old boy in her care was found dead in a plastic storage bin and his two brothers were discovered, beaten and starving, in a locked basement room.
An arrest warrant was issued for the 41-year-old woman police allege beat and burn[ed] the three boys, who had been entrusted to her by their mother -- her cousin -- months earlier.
The surviving boys, ages 4 and 7, were being treated at a hospital for starvation and dehydration and were reported in fair condition. Newark Mayor Sharpe James said one of them had burns from his neck down.
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The police said Shawn Johnell Slappy, 31, who called himself Ms. Murphy[the boys' guardian]'s boyfriend, told them that he forced open the door of a basement room on Saturday morning as he searched for a pair of work boots.
Ms. Murphy, he told investigators, had warned him to stay out of the basement. When he saw two faces emerging from the darkness, Mr. Slappy, unaware that anyone else was living in the duplex apartment, slammed the door and called 911, the police said he told them.
Officers followed Mr. Slappy downstairs, where they found Tyrone and Raheem hiding under the bed in a room fouled by feces and vomit. "It was a nightmare," Mayor James said."
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The first look inside the Newark "House of Horrors" where a dead boy was found in a locked room with his starving brothers reveals a rancid basement filled with squalor, where a hallway reeked of urine from a plastic jar they were forced to use as a toilet. ...
Yet, upstairs in the duplex, where Sherry Murphy - the woman charged with neglecting the children - lived, there are no signs of the shocking conditions in which her cousin's children were forced to live.
The rooms were well-kept. There were no odors. And in the kitchen was a well-stocked refrigerator with enough food for a dinner party. ...
Murphy's friend, Shawn Slappy, found the two boys in the off-limits basement. Murphy had insisted he stay out of the room, police said, but the hospital security guard was late for work and needed his work boots.
He kicked in a locked door and saw one of the boys under the mattress. Later, he told police he presumed the boy was dead. He called police, who rescued 7-year-old Raheem Williams and his 4-year-old brother, Tyrone.
They were dirty, they smelled bad and they were covered with lice. They cowered under a bed soaked with urine, feces and vomit.
They were rushed to Newark's University Hospital, too weak to even speak. Later that night, Raheem said a few words to police:
"I have a brother that I haven't seen in a while."
Cops went back to the house with a dog trained to find cadavers. In a closet, they found Raheem's twin, dead in a purple plastic storage bin and covered with a lumpy blanket. That was Jan. 4.
An autopsy later revealed Faheem died from starvation and blunt-force trauma to the stomach. He may have been dead for at least a month and moved from another location before Murphy moved into the home where the boys were found.
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The state's child welfare agency must answer allegations that caseworkers neglected complaints of abuse at a Newark home where one child was found dead and two others neglected. ...
The Division of Youth and Family Services, which supervises about 50,000 children, received its last known complaint in October 2001, [New Jersey Governor] McGreevey said. The file was closed in February although an investigator never visited the house.
"I do not understand how in good conscience that file could have been closed," McGreevey said on Monday before leaving to visit the two hospitalized children.
DYFS recorded 11 complaints of abuse in the Williams family from August 1992 until 2001. Caseworkers said seven were unsubstantiated, requiring no serious action.
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More sickening detail in links. Pieced together from many different sources. |
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