An update to the story....if you can, read the whole thing because now it becomes a question if the city (or who would be ultimately resonsible) failed to keep up with this family as they slipped thru the cracks:
A Southeast Washington woman accused of killing her four daughters told police that they were "possessed by demons" and that they had been dead for at least four months before marshals found their bodies, according to police and charging papers filed yesterday.
Authorities said they believe the girls, ages 5, 6, 11 and 17, could have been killed as early as May, noting that the bodies were in an advanced stage of decomposition when discovered Wednesday by marshals serving eviction papers at the two-story brick rowhouse. The mother, Banita Jacks, lived a hermitic existence with the bodies upstairs, in a house that had its electricity cut off in September.
Authorities said that Jacks has denied killing the children and said they died in their sleep. Prosecutors said evidence shows otherwise. Brittany Jacks, 17, had three puncture wounds consistent with a stabbing near the neck, they said. Tatianna Jacks, 11, and N'Kiah Fogle, 6, had marks suggesting they were strangled. Aja Fogle, 5, had less-pronounced marks consistent with strangling and signs of blunt-force trauma to the back of her head, prosecutors said.
Jacks, 33, was charged yesterday with murder. While she was being ordered jailed without bond by a judge in D.C. Superior Court, city officials were investigating how government agencies failed to identify a family in trouble. Among the questions: How could Jacks's children disappear for so long without school officials, police or social workers noticing and stepping in to help? Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) promised some answers today.
Some who knew the family said that troubles spiraled in February when Nathaniel Fogle Jr., the father of two of the girls, died of cancer. Soon after his death, Jacks cleared the first floor of furniture, and she grew increasingly distant, they said. At one point, she put an Xbox game system in the front yard of the home, in the 4200 block of Sixth Street SE, and invited neighbors to take it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews
Threaded Mode
