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A Texas mom has been accused of abandoning her children to go on a cruise.
Court records from the Harris County Districk Clerk’s Office show that Lakesha Woods Williams, 29, was charged with abandoning her children with an intent to return, a felony crime, after officers entered her apartment and found her two children alone.
According to a criminal complaint, the woman left her 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter in her Houston apartment from 4 April to 9 April.
A witness in the mother’s apartment building became concerned for the children after she’d heard from other tenants that the children had been left alone and were “worried about their safety” and requested officials conduct a welfare check, the complaint states.
The residents had seen the mother leave the building with luggage around noon on 4 April and did not see her return. The residents said that it was not the first time that the mother had left her children in such a way.
When deputies arrived at the scene, they cleared the apartment and found that no adults were present with the children.
“The apartment was in a complete disarray and had trash and left-over food all over the unit”, the complaint stated, adding that “the unit also had a very potent smell of urine”.
The children told the officers that their mother had left them to go on a cruise and did not know when she was coming back. The mother had a camera in the apartment she was using to watch the children and was keeping in touch with her son using a cellphone she’d given him. The phone was later seized by police as evidence.
The children were released to their aunt. The officers tried contacting the mother but said she’d been switching up her story about her whereabouts and was not cooperating. Her bond has been set at $25,000.
She’s currently being held at Houston’s Baker Street Jail. The Independent has reached out to the Harris County Public Defender’s Office, which is representing Ms Williams, for comment.
Source: independent.co.uk
