Ashli Rene Lock: Mother charged for abandoning malnourished kids, 12 and 1, in filthy motel for weeks
HOUSTON, TEXAS: A Texas mother has been charged for abandoning her two children in a filthy motel room for weeks, leaving them with hardly any food. She pulled her daughter, 12, from school to care for her 1-year-old brother full-time. Ashli Rene Lock, 37, is charged with felony child abandonment by authorities.
Police discovered the children living alone in their own filth at a Quality Inn in Houston. “Officers noted that both of the children appeared malnourished and filthy,” a charging document filed Thursday by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office says. “The one year old was sleeping in a soiled diaper.” The girl, 12, told police that she had “not left this hotel room in about a month,” as per the court filing. She also alleged that Lock “has not provided her with adequate food for her baby brother, so she feeds him mac and cheese.” Lock reportedly works as a bartender.
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Officials described the living space as “something resembling a Marvin Zindler inspired nightmare of unsanitary living conditions, with broken bottles on the floor, drugs in plain view, slime in the refrigerator and moldy food haphazardly strewn throughout. To quote the late Mr. Zindler, ‘it's hell to be poor.’ It is even worse to be a poor and neglected child.” Zindler was a journalist who exposed scams, corruption, and abuse, and died in 2007.
“She said that sometimes her mother comes home from work, sometimes not,” the filing reviewed by The Daily Beast continues. “The twelve-year-old did not have her mother's phone number and had no meaningful way of contacting her mother in the event of an emergency.” The daughter also shared pictures with cops showing the injuries she said she suffered when Lock hit her.
In a similar incident February this year, two mothers from Texas have been charged with endangering a child after their six kids were found inside a Houston residence, living in squalor. The children range in age from one to nine. Riccy Padilla-Hernandez, 28, and Yures Molina, 34, were arrested after Houston Police, who were called to an apartment complex by a maintenance worker, found a little girl who looked visibly unsupervised. The older brother of the little girl took officers to their apartment, where four other kids were found alone. Police did not confirm whether the two mothers are related. However, they were living in the same apartment. Besides the six kids found covered in lice and filth, Padilla-Hernandez's special needs son, 1, was found confined to a crib. The child was so hungry that he started eating his own excrement.
Amid the pandemic, the number of neglected children in homes has increased. In late December, Katelynn Schengeli and Cory Evans were arrested when a 911 call by their eldest child led the police to find four children, including an infant, covered in feces inside an "extremely dirty" residence, in Tyler, Texas. In October, Gloria Williams and Brian Coulter were arrested after three kids were discovered living with the rotting corpse of their brother. Before that, in March 2020, an alcoholic mother of six was charged for forcing her kids to live in a garbage-filled house lined with feces.