Five malnourished children have been found living in car at Walmart with healthy parents, police say.
A deputy said he was on a routine patrol in Greenacres, Florida, last weekend when he spotted a blue Toyota in a Walmart parking lot. It wasn't the look of the vehicle that caught his attention but the smell emanating from it - an odour "similar to that of homeless camps", he said.
Inside was a family of seven. The parents seemed healthy, police said, but the five children, aged from 4 to 14, were filthy, fatigued and so malnourished that their bones were protruding from under their skin, according to WPTV. The oldest reportedly weighed a mere 23kg, just 2kg more than his 8-year-old sibling.
The parents, Donell Barron and Rikki Hart, 34, were arrested on charges of child neglect, according to WPTV. As of Wednesday evening, they were being held in the Palm Beach County Jail in lieu of $1000 bail, the Palm Beach Post reported.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office told local media that the children, all of whom were described as "underweight," were taken to a hospital, where at least one was treated for unusually high blood pressure. The five kids are now in custody of the Florida Department of Children and Families, the Palm Beach Post reported.
Police said they took some of the children to eat at McDonald's, where they "ravenously ate the meals, as if they had not been fed in quite some time".