A five-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl were found living in an abandoned school bus after they were discovered by postal worker Vanessa Picazo.
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According to Picazo, the little girl’s hair was matted like a stray dog’s and the boy looked very sickly.
Vanessa Picazo immediately alerted authorities of the children’s appalling living conditions.
The children’s parents are currently in prison for hurricane-related fraud, but insist they take good care of their kids and their mother says she will be released in a month.
Child welfare agents have stepped in and are still trying to find out how the siblings ended up in such dire conditions, living in the dilapidated vehicle at the end of a muddy, one-lane road.
Picazo said she saw the kids on Wednesday at their home in Splendora, near Houston, Texas, and the two were swiftly placed in foster care while authorities investigate.
The father of the pair said he never intended for the bus to be a permanent home. He said the family had planned to build a house at the site, which was now strewn with reeking trash.
Randal McCann, a Louisiana attorney who represented the children’s mother prior to her imprisonment, said an aunt had been taking care of the children since the case against the parents was launched more than a year ago.
They were not enrolled in school and according to McCann:
“It was believed by everybody involved in this case that [the aunt] was properly tending to those children. What I saw in the newspaper this morning was shocking.”
Gwen Carter, a spokesman for Child Protective Services, said authorities were less concerned about the bus itself than with children’s overall well being.
Both of the children’s parents were convicted of embezzling money from victims of Hurricane Ike, which struck in 2008.
The mother was arrested in December 2010, the father in March 2011.
