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Cops in Florida have arrested a couple after their 2-year-old was discovered alone on a busy highway, wearing just a dirty diaper.
The incident happened at Oak Hill, located north of Titusville, and was reported to police at 10:30 a.m, the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Facebook post.
Motorist Erica Strozier noticed the toddler as he was trying to cross the highway in front of her vehicle. She stopped at once to prevent any vehicle from hitting him.
“When I first saw him, he was looking confused,” Strozier told FOX35. “The baby was just lost, diapers soiled all the way to the ground. Body covered in nothing but mosquito bites.”
While waiting for the cops after she’d alerted them, Strozier kept the child from going on the roadway.
“I was trying to keep the baby calm and was like, ‘Come here, sweetie,’ and the baby came right up to me,” she said.
A mail carrier also helped the woman to hold the toddler who was “wearing only a dirty diaper with his arms covered in bug bites,” according to the sheriff’s office.
Upon searching a nearby trailer park, cops discovered that the kid’s parents had passed out “each apparently under the influence of drugs, frothing at the mouth and initially not responding to the sound of his voice.”
When a deputy yelled to wake them up, the parents got dressed and came out of the house.
“During the investigation, the deputy placed the child in the back seat of his patrol car because there were broken beer bottles on the ground and several knives within the child’s reach,” the police said.
“The home itself was in poor condition, with trash, dirty clothes and dirty dishes piled up, no separate kids’ room, and only one bed, which was just a mattress with no sheets.”
Following the investigation, the police arrested the child’s parents, 25-year-old Jacob Krueger and 28-year-old Yajaira Tirado, and charged them with child neglect.
When asked if the child had breakfast, Tirado told police that he usually “pulls like bread and stuff out by himself.”
According to the police, the couple had a run-in with cops not so long ago.
In January 2018, Tirado was arrested and charged with child neglect after she left her two children alone with “a loose, aggressive dog in the house along with an unsecured shotgun and ammunition.”
Following the recent incident, the two-year-old was taken to the state’s Department of Children and Families, and his parents were sent to the Volusia County Jail.
The charges on them carry a bond of $5,000 each.
“I don’t know what kind of drugs they were on, but it was sickening,” Strozier, who’s a grandmother, told FOX35. “I just shook my head in disbelief.”