Drunk Mom Of 2 Found Passed Out Naked In Roach-Filled ‘House Of Squalor’ — Scared Kids Called Aunt, Police Said
A passed-out drunk mom of two kids was found by police naked and face down on the couch in her apartment — a horrifying home police described as a “house of squalor” — as the two children were so hungry that they desperately called for help to an aunt. To make the Oklahoma City incident even more heartbreaking, investigators discovered the sickening situation just three days before Thanksgiving.
The two children of 32-year-old mom Jennifer Tinsley, however, are likely thankful that they were removed from their mother’s apartment on November 25 and placed in the care of their grandparents. According to another relative who did not wish to be quoted in a report by KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, the kids are now doing much better.
The two kids called their aunt “crying, saying they were hungry and their mother was passed out asleep,” according to a police report revealed by KFOR-TV in Oklahoma. The children were described as crying and very frightened when police arrived to get them out of the home.
The problem was not simply that the children did not feel like feeding themselves. The problem was that there was no edible food in the house. That wasn’t the worst of it. The house was overrun by cockroaches with trash strewn across the floors throughout the apartment, police said.
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In addition, the sink was piled high with moldy, unwashed dishes. Police also found numerous knives and other sharp objects lying loose and unsecured throughout the home where either of the children — a 7-year-old boy and 9-year-old girl — could have reached or been injured by them.
“It was what we often times refer to as a house of squalor,” said Oklahoma City Police Sergeant Gary Knight. “There was trash everywhere. There were cockroaches running around everywhere. There was nothing fit to eat inside the home.”
According to the police report, the children told investigating officers that Jennifer Tinsley “drinks Kentucky Deluxe and will either drink five bottles or one, big bottle every day.” Kentucky Deluxe is an inexpensive brand of Bourbon whiskey.
Despite Oklahoma City temperatures being in the 30s, the apartment was not well-heated and police found no blankets anywhere in the apartment, according to a report by KOCO-TV.
The children told police, according to the report, that not only was their mother generally too drunk to take care of them — Tinsley reportedly never bothered to prepare meals for her children — she was actively abusive. The kids said that their mom often beat them with a broomstick, threw them to the floor and painfully yanked on their hair.
The children told officers that they had not been bathed in at least a month.
“The children had not been properly bathed or cleaned in a very long time. Certainly not good conditions for children to be raised in,” said Knight.
“That’s just lazy. That’s just ridiculous,” Kristian Redbird, a neighbor in the apartment complex, told KFOR.
Redbird said she and other neighbors had no idea of the alarming and repulsive conditions inside Tinsley’s apartment, or how the drunk mom’s two children were being neglected.
“I would have been able to feed the kids if they were hungry, if I would have known that was going on. I just don’t see how any parent can treat their child like that, their little ones,” she said.
Before handing the two kids off to their grandparents for temporary custody, police officers treated the children to a meal at a local McDonald’s restaurant.
The allegedly drunk mom, Jennifer Tinsley, was booked into Oklahoma City Jail and charged with two counts of child neglect.
A full TV news report courtesy of KOKH-TV, can be viewed in the video above, on this page.
[Photo via Oklahoma City Jail]
