Several children were spotted running around a Jersey City street on Wednesday. They were naked and hungry and their mother was nowhere in sight. Two teenage girls came to the rescue.
“They were running up and down the road- no clothes on,” said Nilaja Wyatt, 17. She decided to take control of the situation after her friend Aaliyah Glover said her mother almost ran over one of the kids.
“We saw a little boy — he ran in front of our car so my mother had to swerve her car,” Aaliyah Glover said.
The teens gathered the six children and brought them inside. That’s when they found out the kids’ 2-year-old brother was in the upstairs apartment all by himself. The door was locked, so they broke in.
“He was crying,” Wyatt said. “He had a snotty nose, everything, crying standing by the door.”
They said there was no food in the apartment.
“They were hungry,” Glover said. “We asked them did they eat, he said he didn’t eat in two days.”
So the teens fed and bathed the children and waited for their mom, who was out with a boyfriend, to come home. She never did, so they called the cops.
Police Chief Tom Comey said Francine Davis, 40, had left the children in the care of their oldest sibling, a 14-year-old autistic child. He said Davis had nothing to say when she turned herself in.
“You left your children in the care of somebody who wasn’t emotionally or mentally capable,” Comey said. “What can you say? There’s nothing you can say that can ease that.”
Now these teens are being called heroes.
“I felt like if I was in their situation in their shoes, I would want someone to help me,” Glover said.
Davis is facing six counts of endangering the welfare of a child. The children are now in foster care.
