3 Kids Left Alone Stay in Custody as Parents Face Probe

Three Laguna Niguel children will remain in protective custody through Monday as authorities investigate possible child-endangerment charges against their parents for leaving them home alone overnight.

The case began shortly after 11 p.m. Friday after an 11-year-old boy called 911 to report his 5-year-old brother had a nosebleed that would not stop.

Sheriff’s deputies who arrived at the home in the 25000 block of Hidden Hills found the two boys and a 9-year-old sister alone, officials said.

The parents hadn’t been seen since Friday at 8:30 p.m., when the children said the couple left the house, said Sheriff’s Lt. Stephen Fauchier.

The nosebleed was not serious, and the children were eventually taken to the Orangewood Children’s Home.

Deputies checked the house at 1:30 and 5 a.m. Saturday and got no reply. The parents returned later that morning, saw an investigator’s card tucked in the door and drove to Orangewood, the county’s emergency shelter for abused and neglected children.

Little is known about the family, whose identity was not released by the Sheriff’s Department.

The children will remain at Orangewood through the weekend, until police interview their parents and present their findings to the district attorney’s office for possible filing of charges.

Public attention to such cases came into focus in 1993, when David and Sharon Schoo of Illinois were arrested after they left their daughters, ages 9 and 4, at home alone while traveling to Mexico on a nine-day vacation.

The couple eventually gave the girls up for adoption.

More recently, a Huntington Beach mother, Michiko Kamiyama, spent three months in jail for leaving her 8-year-old daughter alone.

Kamiyama had been called into work late one evening and could not find a baby sitter.

She was convicted of misdemeanor child abuse, but that decision was later overturned.

No California law or court case specifies the age when a child can be left alone at home, or for how long.

Exactly what constitutes child neglect in such cases has long been the subject of debate.