My wife brought this article to my attention and it just made me ill. In a case similar to that of Austrian a$$hole Josef Fritzl, ALFRED SANTIAGO kept the three children of his girlfriend locked in the bathroom of an extended stay hotel, Budget Suites of America, for a year while he beat the boys and sexually abused the girl.According to authorities, ALFRED SANTIAGO did not care what happened to the children because he felt, as they were not his he was not responsible for them. I am still trying to wrap my head around how he felt this "logic" justified the imprisoning, rape and abuse of the three children he kept locked in the bathroom of a Budget Suites of America extended stay hotel room.
Here is the whole story, I feel sick.
Three children were kept in a hotel bathroom for about a year and were "horribly emaciated" when police found them earlier this month, authorities said. One claimed to have been repeatedly sexually assaulted.
The children's mother, 30-year-old Abneris Santiago, is charged with injury to a child. Her 37-year-old live-in boyfriend, Alfred Santiago, is charged with aggravated sexual assault and continuous sexual abuse.
The extended stay hotel where the Santiagos lived sits alongside one of Dallas' busiest freeways. It has daily and weekly rates and offers maid service for an extra cost, though it wasn't clear if hotel employees had entered the unit where the children were found.
An attorney for the hotel chain said there were no complaints from other guests and employees about the unit.
"When law enforcement and management arrived ... the unit was very, very clean," said Steven Stefani, senior counsel for a Budget Suites of America. "What became apparent is these people worked very hard in concealing these children in the back bathroom."
The Santiagos remained jailed Wednesday. Abneris Santiago was being held on $50,000 bail, while Alfred Santiago was being held on $125,000 bail. Her initial court appearance is not expected until Aug. 3, said her attorney, James Jamison.
His attorney, Richard Carrizales, declined to comment.
According to an arrest affidavit, Abneris Santiago called police on July 2 and asked for help getting her children and belongings from the hotel. Officers found a healthy 1-year-old girl - the child of the Santiagos, Jamison said - in a crib.
Inside the bathroom, they found an 11-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy and a 5-year-old boy - Abneris Santiago's children from other relationships, Jamison said. It was apparent the children suffered from "serious physical, emotional and mental neglect," according to the affidavit.
The 10-year-old was covered in bruises and all three were "horribly emaciated, underweight and malnourished," the affidavit said.
The 11-year-old told authorities that their mother left them with her boyfriend while she worked. She said they were allowed to leave the bathroom only when he took a shower and that they were regularly beaten and rarely fed.
The girl told police she had been sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend for at least three years. She described numerous rapes and said she was forced to perform oral sex on him. She also said the boyfriend threatened to kill her if she told her mother about the assaults.
The children were initially hospitalized for 10 days. The 10-year-old was hospitalized again recently, said Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marissa Gonzales. All four children are now in temporary foster care.
Abneris Santiago told police that Alfred Santiago did not care for her children because, according to him, "they were not his responsibility," the affidavit said.
"She just had a history of making poor judgments about her male companions," Jamison said. "I think ultimately the evidence will show that this man was controlling her and controlling the children."
Abneris Santiago's brother, Abner Santiago, came to Dallas from Ohio to check on the family after their mother spoke with her daughter on the phone, The Dallas Morning News reported. Abner Santiago said family members had been concerned about his sister for several years since she met Alfred Santiago and moved from Florida, where her mother had been "basically raising her kids for her."
He was with his sister and police when they went to the hotel. The children were so emaciated that they threw up when child protective workers first tried to feed them. The children's lips were dry, swollen and cracked, their ribs were protruding, and their cheeks and eyes were sunken into dark hollows.
"My jaw just hit the floor," Abner Santiago told the newspaper. "I just broke down."
Jamison told the AP his client was afraid to tell authorities about the abuse.
"I think it did take a lot of courage on her behalf to notify the police about this situation and bring the police to her residence to rescue the children," he said.
SOURCE: Jeff Carlton, The Associated Press
Here is another article on the topic which indicates the Uncle was largely responsible for the intervention and rescue of the three children locked in a Dallas Extended Stay hotel room for a year.
It's hard to find a hero in a sick story about the torture and starvation of children.
It's crazy to look at three kids held prisoner for months in the dirty bathroom of a cheap motel room and see any evidence of good fortune in their young lives.
Yet in one respect, these children – bruised, filthy and traumatized as they were – had a little piece of luck.
There was somebody out there who cared enough about them to ask questions and, dissatisfied with the evasive answers, drive 1,200 miles to find out what the hell was going on.
The children – an 11-year-old girl and her two brothers, 6 and 10 – were rescued early this month when their uncle, Abner Santiago, made a marathon drive from Cleveland to Dallas to check up on them.
What he found made him sick.
Frail and emaciated as famine victims, the kids had been starved and beaten, police say, by their mother's boyfriend, Alfred Santiago (who shares the same last name as his girlfriend's family, but is not related). The boyfriend, police say, had been raping the little girl regularly.
The children's mother, who worked six days a week while her boyfriend "cared for" the kids, had been unwilling or unable to stop him.
"I thought something was wrong, but I never imagined anything close to this," said Abner Santiago, who has returned to his family and job in Ohio while police and child-welfare workers sort out the case against his sister and her boyfriend. "God, I just wish I'd gone sooner."
Abner, 35, does not think he did anything especially heroic. His mother, who lives in Florida, was worried about her grandchildren. During infrequent phone calls, the children's mother, Abneris Santiago, was giving her mother robotic, perfunctory responses. She wouldn't return Abner's calls.
"We needed to know what was going on," he said.
Yet there are cases here in this city, too many of them, in which families or neighbors suspect there might be something wrong, but they don't interfere.
They don't want to cause a family rift or involve the cops or butt in where they're clearly not wanted. They don't want child-welfare authorities "to take the kids away" from their son or daughter or siblings.
So they do nothing.
They let adults, as in the case of these children's mother, parry their inquiries with a vague insistence that "everything's fine" and a more vague intimation that it's-none-of-your-business.
These kids' uncle and aunts and grandmother, far removed and discouraged from asking questions, could have thrown up their hands and said, "Well, she didn't want us there."
They could have protested, "How were we supposed to know what was going on?"
Other people have done so. A woman in South Dallas heard a baby screaming, night after night, on the other side of her apartment wall, but she didn't want to make trouble with her neighbors by calling the cops. The baby finally quit screaming when her parents beat her to death.
A 13-year-old Tarrant County boy named Stephen Hill died in 1991 after being chained up and starved to death by his parents.
Neighbors had seen him scavenging for food in garbage cans, but they didn't want to mess with his odd, reclusive parents.
Family members in another state didn't bother calling anymore; the grownups never returned their calls.
"Stephen simply dropped out and disappeared, and no one seemed to notice or care enough to find out what had happened to him," this newspaper said in a 1992 editorial.
There have been other cases, miserably similar, where children quite simply vanished.
As I said, Abner Santiago, who has three children of his own, is a reluctant hero. When he saw the condition of his sister's children, he was too shaken to speak. Incredibly, it was his 11-year-old niece who tried to comfort him.
"She's been like a mother to the other kids," he said. "After everything she's been through, she was telling me, 'It'll be all right.' "
There was a long pause on the phone. He was crying.
"Kids can't fend for themselves. That's the duty of a parent, to make sure they get the love and protection they need," he said.
"My sister – " he broke off and started again.
"She's my sister. She's blood. But she did not do her duty as a mother."
Thank God, then, that the extended family cared enough to do theirs.
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