A young girl was found alive after surviving on chocolate while being trapped inside her home alongside the bodies of her mother and brother.
A four-year-old girl was found in her New York home last month after her mother Lisa Cotton, 38, and her brother Nazir Millen, eight, were found dead by Cotton’s eldest daughter.
Their landlord had initially raised the alarm after calling Cotton’s father Hubert, 71, asking if she had moved out.
He told the New York Post: ‘I had been trying to call her for days and she never answered. I figured she didn’t answer me because she didn’t want me to talk to me.’
Concerned, he sent Lisa’s eldest daughter to the apartment to check on them, where she made the tragic discovery.
She found Nazir, who was disabled after being born prematurely, slumped in his chair next to a feeding tube.
The eldest daughter then went looking for her mother but found four-year-old Promise ‘feeding herself with chocolate’ on Cotton’s bed.
‘She picked her up and ran out and called the police,’ Hubert said, with a transcript of the 911 call stating that she had seen ‘bugs crawling’ on Nazir’s body.
It is not known how long the mother and son had been dead before they were found, but neighbours had reportedly been complaining of a foul odor that smelled like ‘death’ for weeks.
Eric Perez, who lived above Cotton, said: ‘The landlord hadn’t done wellness checks, people had called, neighbors called.
‘It just smells like rat infested… the exterminator said the same thing – the smell is similar to rats and even death.’
Police then completed a welfare check after receiving an anonymous 911 call, but no one answered the door to the second-floor flat.
And despite neighbours telling officers that they hadn’t seen the mother or her children in two weeks, cops said they had no reason to break down the door as they did not hear any noises or notice any smells, police sources told the news site.
A neighbor added: ‘[The police] said they’d be back in a few days. One of the social workers said she was trying to get a court order to have the door broken in.’
Neighbours had also reportedly claimed they had heard ‘screaming’ coming from the apartment for several days.
After the bodies were discovered, neither reportedly showed any signs of trauma, and police told Hubert that they believed his daughter, who had asthma, may have died of cardiac arrest, leaving Nazir to tragically starve to death.
Promise is believed to have kept herself alive by eating chocolate she found in the family home, and was sent to a local hospital in stable condition.
Devastated Hubert is now taking care of Promise in his Bronx home and said of Nazir: ‘He was so small. I held him in my palm. Like a bird, like a young bird.’
He thinks Promise may now be traumatised from living with the bodies of her mother and brother for several days, and explained that while she has not said anything, she often looks at him ‘like she knows something’.
Hubert told the news outlet that Cotton had struggled with her mental health and believed she may have had bipolar disorder.
Police sources also claimed that the mother had an Administration for Children’s Services case pending against her, after she was arrested in June 2021 on child abandonment charges.
Sources said she had been acting erratically, swinging her young daughter around in a stroller and lighting a wig on fire in front of a commercial strip.
When the police arrived, she was allegedly found walking away from the child, and authorities said the case was later sealed.
An ACS spokesperson told the outlet that the incident is now under investigation.