LOWELL, Mass. — Police responding to a report of a 3-year-old being locked in a sweltering, filthy attic were told by other children, “Mommy does this when she gets angry,” a prosecutor said Friday.
Kristen Paquette, 27, was charged with reckless endangerment to a child and assault and battery on a child and was being held on $10,000 bail after arraignment Friday in Lowell District Court.
Her family and attorney portrayed her as an overwhelmed mother dealing with an especially unruly child.
Police said the boy was naked, covered in urine and feces, and had minor bumps on his forehead when officers acting on a tip went to Paquette’s Lowell apartment Thursday.
They estimated the temperature inside the attic at over 100 degrees. The door to the room was locked, and the only window was nailed shut, prosecutor Dan Harren said. Feces-covered child-size fingerprints were on the wall, he said.
Health officials condemned the apartment afterward.
Officers said another boy and a girl at the home told them Paquette took the 3-year-old by his arms “and dragged him upstairs to the attic.” The children told officers such things happened “a lot.”
Harren said the children told authorities, “Mommy does this when she gets angry.”
The woman’s father, Alfred Paquette, said police were misrepresenting the situation. He said his daughter is a single mother who is overwhelmed by her four children — a daughter and three sons.
He said the first floor of the home is clean, and the children seem happy and never appeared abused.
Two of the other children, ages 6 and 9, were placed in state custody, as was a third child who wasn’t home at the time.
