The apartment complex was as I’d imagined on the way over: missing bricks, cheap paint, and a splash of graffiti here and there. Our team had been dispatched to this dodgy part of town before but never to this building in particular. Drug traffic was and continues to be rampant around here, so we were all on our toes.
“I’m guessing some addicts,” Beck said as she hung the black backpack over her shoulder. “What do you think?”
“I’m just hoping it’s not teenagers like the last time,” I said.
As we stepped out of the car I noticed an unusual amount of cars at the scene. I’d grown used to seeing two or perhaps even three police units. Thirteen seemed a bit overkill in my book.
“Shit. This ain’t looking very good,” Beck said.
As we hopped out of our ride, a woman in her late forties approached us and pushed aside the yellow line that had been placed to secure the crime scene. Her eyes conveyed a cocktail of anger, confusion and distraught. She clasped her phone tightly with her right hand, pushing it firmly into her chest.
“About damn time!” the woman bellowed, “I’ve reported this thirty times! Thirty friggin’ times! Those kids would be alive if it weren’t for all of you murderers! You fucking murderers, the lot of you!”
The woman then bursted into a cacophony of sobs and wails as an officer forcibly ushered her behind the yellow line. I stood there, frozen as cold sweat ran through my forehead. What were we getting ourselves into?
“I don’t want to go up there.” Beck said after what seemed as an eternity later.
“No kidding.” I replied. “The report said the bodies were in the rooftop. I was low-key hoping some burglars or even wild animals at this point. But kids?”
Beck and I climbed the stairway, fighting every single fiber of my being that screamed to go the opposite direction. We passed through the apartment on the third and final floor, the only access to the rooftops besides a small maintenance hatch. The apartment itself wasn’t in rough shape, or at least not as I had dreaded on the way up. Some takeout, clothes, leftover food, and bags were haphazardly scattered around the floor, but other than that nothing really to write home about.
Then we got to the rooftop.
“I hope you’re ready for this.” Detective Hernández said as he greeted us on the other side of the door that separated the apartment from the rooftop. “I-I need to call my wife and kids. I’m never letting them out of the house again. Jesus Christ.”
Although I’d been to many scenes before, you never get really used to the stench of rotting corpses. Flies flew around us as we navigated through the piles of eroded styrofoam plates and cups that polluted the ground. Had I been blindfolded and asked where I was, I would’ve instantly guessed we were actually at a garbage landfill. We then ran across a small bucket of water, green and with thick layer of moss. It had probably been there for the better part of a year or so.
“Is that…what I think it is?” Beck asked pointing at a pile of black debris.
“Feces, yeah, it seems they had them up here for years,” I said half-stricken with disgust.
Finally, we came across three little corpses, piled each on top of the other. Their arms were curled along each other, as if trying to be of some comfort for one another. From the looks of the decomposition, they had been dead for approximately three days.
“Beck, I think we should take as little time as possible he-“
I suddenly heard a hurl coming from behind me. Beck, who had spent at least double my field time, was vomiting all over the floor. After vomiting for about a solid thirty seconds, she limped away from the scene and stepped into the apartment, leaving me all alone with the most horrific scene I’d ever seen in my entire career.
“I’m sorry., I said as I crouched over to the small corpses, “I’m so sorry you had to go through this.”
I regained enough composure to take several pictures before joining a much paler Beck back in the apartment. From the looks of it, their parents, active drug addicts, had these children chained them up there. They hurled food and water when they could and remembered to do so, which wasn’t often considering their severe malnutrition at the time of their deaths. The victims were two girls and one boy.
The girls were 11 and 7 years old. The boy, however, was only 2. Further lab analysis concluded that all of them had been sick for a while. HIV.
Digging a bit more around the case revealed why they had all been infected. The parents sold all three children to men for money in order to buy more drugs. But when the kids got really sick, they decided to leave town, abandoning them for us to find three days later.
Those monsters did get caught, and are currently serving time in prison, where I’m sure the other inmates are giving them what anyone could consider a faint semblance of justice. It’s truly amazing how inmates can learn so much about each other in such a quick amount of time. I read some prison reports that even before the man was placed in his cell, he suffered a heavy beating in a freak accident which also involved an inmate shoving a large pipe up his rectum.
I just wished someone would’ve listened to the lady who had reported this. Perhaps if someone had paid attention to what she was saying, three innocents wouldn’t have had to be dragged through a literal hell. In my line of work, I’ve learned to always be ready to be utterly surprised. The human race has an obscene ability to commit atrocious acts upon each other.
I’ve driven through that complex a couple of times after the incident. I even asked a couple of the locals if they’d rented that rooftop apartment. Locals won’t go near it. Too haunted or so they said.
They claim you can still hear them, begging and scratching the floor for some comfort, for some shred of love their parents should’ve given them. I choose to not believe them though. I keep hoping that after going through it all they finally found peace in some afterlife.