Why Stephanie Spicer and Joseph Spicer allowed their home to become the equivalent of an open sewer remains a puzzle after the couple were arrested on Tuesday night when sheriff’s deputies in Elberta, Alabama found two pre-teen children and an elderly man living in the sickening conditions.
In fact, the only reason that law enforcement officers discovered the home from hell was that a deputy patrolling on CC Road in the rural town of about 1,500 inhabitants when she noticed an 8-year-old girl who appeared to be caring for a senior citizen who, it turned out, was the girl’s grandfather.
“The deputy thought the eight-year-old was a little young to be taking care of a grandfather on her own and inquired as to where her parents were,” said Sheriff’s Department Captain Steve Arthur.
The answer to her query was worse than she could have imagined. The little girl took the deputy next door to a trailer that looked so run down that from the outside, it was hard to imagine that anyone actually lived there.
Grass and weeds around the trailer not only had not been cut recently, they appeared to never have been cut at all, standing as between six- and eight-feet tall, surrounding the decrepit mobile home.
When the deputy knocked on the door, Stephanie Spicer answered and agreed to let her in. What the deputy found turned her stomach.
An 11-year-old boy was living there with the Spicers, presumably their child, though police did not confirm the relationship between the Spicers and either of the two pre-teens.
The trailer was not only run down and falling apart, the whole inside of the place was caked with garbage — and feces on the floor. Cockroaches and rats infested the trailer as well, not surprisingly given the filth that littered the place, which also lacked any electricity or running water.
The case is just the latest in a series of instances in which parents have been arrested for neglecting children in homes that they’ve allowed to deteriorate to the point where living in a dumpster would be no better.
Also on Tuesday, in North Dakota, four adults were charged in connection with a filth-filled home in which two infants, as well as two teenage girls, were woefully mistreated.
In June, a mom of 12 kids in Oklahoma, Kodi Faircloth, was arrested when her home , in which four of those children lived, was found filled with garbage and feces.
Stephanie and Joseph Spicer were held on $2,000 bond. The two children were placed in the custody of the state’s Department of Human Resources.
[Images: Baldwin County Sheriff’s Department]
