VA: woman kept two of her kids, ages two and three, in ‘filthy makeshift cages’ [VIDEO]

by McIntosh | September 13, 2017 2:22 am

If you can believe it, one woman from Virginia has made bail after she was arrested for keeping her children locked up in cages like circus animals.

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Malista Ness-Hopkins is 38 and is looking at charges of abuse and neglect after she was caught by social services abusing her children, ages two and three, locking them up like animals, by screwing in bars on the top of their cribs.

She had other children as well who were no better off – living in complete filth. Kate Bonniwell is the social services worker who saw firsthand what was going on in this house of horrors and she described exactly what she saw when she spoke up in a preliminary hearing. The work she had to do to get the children out of their cells took at least 20 minutes to take out every screw that was laid and she was even using an electric screw gun to do it. She also told the court that as she was working, the two year-old was making ‘animal sounds’ that she described as hissing.

When the top of the cage came off, the children were still, unsure on how to process what to do next.

‘The children didn’t act like normal children,’ Bonniwell stated. She also said that the other children that were not locked up, were utterly filthy and ‘infested with lice’.

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There was also a five and a six year-old that were found in another room just lying down on a torn up mattress as if they were in a drug den. Just to further paint how bad this home was, the whole place stank of urine and the toilet in the bathroom housed black water.

It was bad. Real bad.

Dishes and other kitchen items could be found spread across the house, with rotten food still on it. Nothing was clean in this hell. The children were immediately evacuated from the premises and away from their ‘mother’.

Defense attorney Tucker Watson, who represented Ness-Hopkins, claimed that the woman was just ‘overwhelmed’. He further tried to explain that the woman had fallen on hard times and that the condition of the house and the built cages used to store the two small ones were not ‘directly harmful to the children’.

Lawyers. They will say anything and that’s why the judge refused to agree and instead sent the case to the grand jury.

Endnotes:
  1. [Image]: https://rightwingnews1.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/malista-ness-hopkins-photo.jpg
  2. [Image]: https://rightwingnews1.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/636407290672520266-abuse-houseIMG-8506.jpg

Source URL: https://rightwingnews.com/crime/va-woman-kept-two-kids-ages-two-three-filthy-makeshift-cages/