When police officer Patricia Warner walked through the front door of a tired two-flat building here on Tuesday night, she thought she was stepping into a crack house.
What she discovered was worse.Sitting on the cold floor, next to a struggling radiator, were two toddlers in dirty diapers, sharing a bone with a dog.
Scattered throughout the rest of the filthy two-bedroom apartment, buried beneath blankets and dirty clothes on the floor or crammed on top of two soiled mattresses, were 17 other children, ranging in age from 1 to 14. One of the three adults in the apartment at the time was found sleeping alone on a king-size bed.
"I was in shock," the veteran officer said on Wednesday. "We just kept finding kids when we pulled the blankets up."
No drugs were found in the squalor but Officer Warner and her partners had stumbled onto what one child-protection advocate said Thursday was the largest case of child neglect he had ever seen in Chicago since entering the field in 1968.
"We've had 12, 11, 8 kids taken from a house like this before," the advocate, Patrick T. Murphy, said Wednesday. "The number is unusual, but the scenario is a daily occurrence. That's the real story. That's the real tragedy."
Scared and hungry, the children were taken away by the police from the first-floor apartment on the city's West Side, where stories of hardship and heartbreak seem commonplace.
But this story was hard for even longtime residents to understand.
"Everytime you think you heard the worst, you hear something even more terrible," said Juanita Johnson, 57. "Lord, how do babies make it today?"
The 19 children, the offspring of at least four sisters in their 20s who lived together at the roach-infested apartment, were fed, hugged, treated and released into the custody of a state agency, itself under increasing scrutiny for its handling of other child neglect and abuse cases.
But one of the children, a 4-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, remained in the hospital on Wednesday as doctors and the police examined what appeared to be cuts, bruises, belt marks and cigarette burns on his body. In the words of one police officer, angry at what he had seen the night before, "It's clear the boy didn't have a normal childhood."
The sisters, the father of one of the children and another man living at the apartment, were charged on Wednesday with child neglect. The charge is a misdemeanor and carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison.
The police are planning to question another sister, the mother of two of the children. She was not at home because she was in a hospital, giving birth to her third child.
The police arrived at the apartment at 219 N. Keystone Ave. about 11 p.m. after receiving complaints that someone was selling drugs from a broken front window. Neighbors said drug dealing was a common way of life on the block and in the poor neighborhood.
The neighbors said drug dealers often conducted their business in front of 219.