Photo courtesy PCSO.
Photo courtesy PCSO.LAKELAND (FOX 13) -
Lori Hamilton has four kids -- one in the custody of her sister, one in juvenile detention, and two who were living with her, until yesterday when she was arrested.
Her 5-year-old son just became the center of the newest trauma in her life. Investigators say Hamilton would put him in a filthy kitchen cabinet and screw the door shut when he got too noisy at night.
"I don't see it happening," insisted Hamilton's sister, Wanda Hawthorne. "She told me the reason the screws were there was because she had dishes down there, she didn't want the kids to get into them, and they screwed them in."
Hamilton was been baker acted at least once and has been monitored by the Department of Children and Families for a while. A few months ago, DCF called in the sheriff's office to investigate.
Hamilton was just arrested at her sister's house. Details of the alleged situation are gruesome; the sheriff's office says the boy would be not be let out of the cabinet for several hours at a time and would end up urinating and defecating on himself -- a trauma that he could carry with him for years..
"It takes a long time, sometimes, for these things to repair themselves and sometimes they don't repair themselves," stated Donna Wood of the Polk Sheriff's Office.
