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The article is quite long so I only pasted the first half here, click the link to read the whole thing.

" Part One: The Feral Child

PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

Months went by. The face never reappeared.

Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.

Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"

While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .

The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.

At his feet, something stirred.

• • •

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.

He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."

Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?

"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "

He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.

So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.

"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."

What a horrible story. Kudos to those adoptive parents who took her on.

The mother is a piece of work, but with an IQ of 77, what can be expected? Still, there are huge holes in her story -- entire years of child development that aren't accounted for. She said the girl would tear off her clothes if she put clothes on her -- but certainly not when she was a baby!

People suck, that's pretty much it.

I think I read a longer version of this that talked about the girl in her new foster or adoptive home now.

I couldn't read the whole thing, it was too disturbing and made me very, very angry. The biological "mother" needs the death penalty.

That is the most heartbreaking story I have ever read.

Her family are saints (even the brother who seems to get that Dani needs their parents more). And they are proving that you do try to give every possiblity to a child so they can grow. The fact that they didn't do the IV route and were looking to adopt was a refreshing story. The next step of taking on a child who was so damaged by her surroundings, is amazing.

Her birth cow, on the other hand, low IQ or not, is a vile piece of work that needs to be locked in a closet for 4 years.

Quote:Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."

Spoiled? As a baby?

Every part of the article that was about the birth cow frustrated me.

Glad that Dani and her family have moved and that she is getting love and different therapies.

kirby Wrote:The biological "mother" needs the death penalty.

I know that she's vile and despicable, but since when does our society execute people who are mentally challenged ("retarded" in the language I grew up with) and mentally ill? What she did was abominable, but she didn't do because she enjoyed torturing her children, she did it because she doesn't know any better and doesn't have the brain capacity to understand any better. She hasn't a clue. I thought the death penalty was for evil motherfuckers who get off on committing murder for the fun of it, who know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it, and don't give a shit. This woman isn't a murderer, she's suffering from mental illness and minimal intelligence, and she'll never get better and she'll never be okay. I doubt she was brought up in a perfectly sane home by great parents, either.

I grew up living next door to a woman who was mentally ill and mentally challenged, but she was just on the borderline, as an adult she managed to get an associates degree and find a low paying office job of minimal responsibility. She had two children (a boy and girl) who were also mentally challenged and a husband who was mentally ill as well as had his own mental challenges, and he was a marine reservist. The children were being raised in a fucked up crazy home that was utterly filthy and terribly smelly and full of bugs and filled with shrieking, and the husband eventually hanged himself when the children were young. So those kids never had a chance to be normal and live normal lives. The boy started to grow up into a furious teen, getting into drugs and incapable of relating to people, and there was no thought that he needed help, even though his IQ was very low and he was very disturbed after his father's suicide. The girl, especially, had a very diminished capacity to comprehend the simplest things, you couldn't even really talk to her. And what happened? At 14 she got pregnant because some teen boy at her school took advantage of the fact that she was barely aware of life around her, she didn't even know that sex would make her pregnant. And her mother? She was excited to be a grandma. I was in the process of moving away after the girl had her baby, and that baby was 8 months old at the time and was not developing normally at all, it still behaved like a newborn, not aware of much of anything. It's nearly 20 years later, I can't imagine how fucked up that baby's life turned out to be--a mother who was always going to be childlike, a grandmother who kept a filthy home filled with bugs, not a chance in hell that kid developed normally. And last I heard the son was in and out of jail.

That's how this shit plays out, generation after generation, with the mentally ill and the mentally challenged, just on the edge of society---not bad enough to be institutionalized, but not together enough to have clean homes and raise children responsibly. I have no idea what the solution is, other than family and children services should be funded well enough so that they can do their jobs by keeping an eye on these families and helping them when they can. In an ideal world these people would not be allowed to breed, but they can and they do, a lot. It's really fucking sad, and it goes on and on, passing from parents to kids without end. I mean, should children in homes like that immediately be pulled out and plunged into foster care, where the chances of finding loving families aren't much better than what they already have? I don't know.

I do know that I have infinite respect for the people who adopted Dani. People like them are extremely rare, most people could never handle this kind of daily challenge.

Anastasia -- very good points. Unfortunately, this sort of thing, then makes great support for the argument that the mentally ill should be sterilized mandatorily. If they can't ever learn and won't ever grow out of it, then perhaps they should not be allowed to reproduce.

That's a huge slippery slope, though -- the main thing would be, what is the end-point for mental illness? This lady's case seems "obvious", but what about a person with, say, 10 more IQ points?

I also knew a retarded lady who had children when I was a kid, but it was a totally different situation. She had a normal husband who loved her, but he had to manage her quite strictly. He would have to tell her to feed the children, but once reminded, she was quite capable of cooking basic meals and doing dishes. She had to be told to change the baby's diaper, but she did so very well. He would call her at noon to remind her to have a lunch, sometimes telling her specifically what to make -- "Don't forget to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Don't forget to put away the food. Don't forget to wash the dishes." He would call when it was time for her to walk down the street to meet the bus and escort the kids home. He would call before the end of the workday to remind her to cook supper.

Unfortunately, she also approached most of the adult men she met with an offer of sex. I remember overhearing the husband warn my Dad that she would offer, and she did, the next time we came over -- "Hi, how are you? Do you want to go to bed?" I remember standing there with my mouth open, while my mother replied for him as if it were an invitation to tea -- "no thanks, how are you doing? Shall we go inside?" "Okay!"

She was probably very lucky. I don't know how they ended up -- maybe he got fed up with catching her in bed with men, but maybe he put up with it, since he seemed to understand her condition very well. Perhaps he loved controlling a woman so closely. Perhaps he loved her that much that he was willing to work with her. Who knows? But it seems clear that if he hadn't controlled her so closely, the children would have been neglected, their basic needs forgotten, because she somehow couldn't do it on her own, and had to be told what to do.

This was a horrible, horrible situation with a happy outcome for Dani. I don't know what will become of her brothers, but it sounds like they are managing (it said they are at home with their mom.)

If I were to blame anyone, it would be the men the mother hooked up with after her husband was gone. It must have been obvious she wasn't firing on all cylinders, and they probably took advantage of that. I don't know, though. The whole thing is just very unfortunate.

I wish she didn't have pets, too. "A closet full of kittens?" What the fuck? This lady just needs to not have responsibility for any living creatures!

I think Dani's new family are remarkable people, especially her big brother who gave up his own personal space so that she could heal. Parts of this story just really choked me up. I'm so glad there are still good people in this world.

Jen M.