Valley Woman Sought in Suspected Neglect Case

Just days after a young mother was arrested on charges of leaving her three toddlers unattended in their fetid Los Angeles apartment, police were searching Wednesday for a San Fernando Valley woman suspected of leaving her three children alone in a house without water or electricity.

Unlike the Los Angeles case, the Valley children were older, including a 13-year-old girl who may have been left in charge of her siblings, 7 years and 11 months of age.

Police, called by the worried father of one of the children, went to the home of Saundra Crockett about 1 a.m. Wednesday and were met by her 13-year-old daughter, Det. Andy Monsue said.

The younger children were asleep and there was no adult in the house, he said.

Monsue would not describe conditions in the house, except to say “it lacks the things that you would ordinarily find in a home.”

The officers who found the children fed them before turning them over to the Department of Children’s Services for care. Their mother “is being sought for questioning at this point,” Monsue said.

“We found an unfit home,” he said. “In our opinion, the children were being neglected and endangered.”

The discovery came on the heels of a similar incident in which police said a South Los Angeles woman left her three children--all under the age of 3--in a squalid apartment. That woman pleaded not guilty Wednesday to three counts of felony child abuse.

“We’re dealing with this quite a bit this week, but this is something that occurs every day in Los Angeles,” said Schuyler Sprowles, spokesman for the Department of Children’s Services.

“We get 1,300 reports a month of caretaker absence where we are having to respond to allegations of lack of supervision of children in the household,” Sprowles said.

The three Sunland children have been placed in foster homes, Sprowles said. Within 72 hours of taking children into custody, the department must go before a judge for a hearing to determine what further action will be taken.

Although the case in some ways parallels the incident in South Los Angeles, the age of the oldest child raised the question of when is it appropriate to leave younger children in the care of an older child, with no adult present.

“A 13-year-old might appear old enough to manage the children but that depends on the circumstances found in the home,” Monsue said. “She must have the tools even if she was responsible enough to take over the caregiving.”

“If you’re talking about after-school care until Mom comes home from work at 6 p.m., 13 is fine,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Maurizi said. “If you’re talking about all day and all night and no provisions in the house, that’s very different.”

Monsue said the house had none of the necessities the girl would have needed to carry out the responsibility she was given.

Neighbors said they knew little about what went on inside the gray stucco house, saying the family kept to themselves.

But some neighbors said they suspected something was amiss because the 13-year-old girl frequently asked to borrow water and use their phones. She borrowed bread from one neighbor.

The girl “said her water and power was off for a couple of weeks and she would come over and get water,” said one neighbor, who asked not to be identified.

The girl seemed to be dutiful, the neighbor said, riding her bike or walking to the store to buy things for the younger children.

“We just thought [the mother] put a lot of responsibility on the girl,” the neighbor said of the mother. “I didn’t know she wasn’t there.”

Jenny Quinn, an eighth-grader who attends school with the 13-year-old, said the girl sometimes confided in her, describing an unhappy home life.

“The only time she would get out was when she borrowed things from neighbors,” Jenny said.

She described the petite blonde as very sweet and so sensitive that “if somebody says something wrong to her she cries very easy.”