CHICAGO - Street-hardened cops were shocked Wednesday to find 19 children in one filthy apartment, eating dog scraps off floors strewn with feces and cockroaches.
But what's equally shocking, says a Chicago child advocate, is that such grim scenes are increasingly "not unusual."
"We've got 19 kids every day" plucked from filth and neglect, says Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy.
The discovery of the kids - from age 14 to less than a year - has provoked outrage against the state child protection system. It previously investigated three of the families.
But in Chicago and across the nation, advocates say, overburdened agencies are no match for the drugs, poverty and ignorance that unravel families and victimize kids.
"People are doing all kinds of crazy things to kids," says Illinois Department of Children and Family Services spokeswoman Martha Allen. "We are trying our best to keep up."
Arrested Wednesday on charges of child neglect, a misdemeanor, were five mothers, an uncle and a father. One woman, Denise Turner, mother of a son, 4, and daughter, 3, was charged with cruelty to children, a felony. Others:
Maxine Melton, 26; sons 2, 5, 6, 7 and a daughter 9.
Mayfay Melton, 25; sons 6 and 8, daughters 4 and 7.
Denise Melton, 24; a son 1, daughters 4 and 5.
Cassandra Melton, 22; sons 1 and 3, a daughter 2.
Gregory Turner, 25.
Johnny Melton, 28.
Boys ages 1 and 14 also were found in the house, but their mother, Diane Melton, has not been charged.
Allen said a 4-year-old boy was hospitalized. The others were "in pretty good health, considering what they had been subjected to."
The area around 219 N. Keystone is called "K-Town," because the street names start with K. It is bleak, with burned-out and abandoned buildings.
Still, resident Lovell Simmons says, neighbors "try to keep an eye out for each other." And Dotrice Simmons says that when she visited 219 last summer, "It was never bad."
So neighbors were shocked when police, investigating drug activity, swarmed into the first-floor apartment and found:
Children "were eating off the floor out the bowls the dogs were eating out of," said police Lt. Fred Bosse. "The conditions were totally decrepit - the floors, the walls - with roaches crawling over everything."
"The only remorse (the adults) showed was they didn't want to be arrested," said police Officer Maggie Gutierrez.
One child had cigarette burns, cuts and bruises, police Sgt. Russell Mueller said.
Allen would not say which families previously caught the state's attention. But she said one mother was noted for "a baby born with drugs in his system" in 1992; another for "inadequate child supervision" in 1991; and a third last November for "inadequate supervision and abuse."
After police took the adults to jail and the children to get care Wednesday, reporters wandered through 219. They found a refrigerator with a huge tureen of spaghetti - and mounds of spaghetti on the floor. They found the radiators warm, but cold streaming through blanketed windows.
A man who said he was a relative surveyed the scene. He said the mothers were sisters.
Public guardian Murphy goes to court today for the children. Allen said the head count might rise to 20: One mother had another baby Wednesday.
