S.C. Officers Rescue Kids, Help Fix Mobile Home

The officers ran records on both parents and found nothing wrong -- except poverty.

Feb. 20, 2012

4 min read

Feb. 20--LESSLIE -- At the end of a dirt road southeast of Rock Hill sits the last mobile home of a bunch of mobile homes. On the afternoon of Jan. 10, York County Sheriff's Office deputies Chad Davis and Jonathan Reed were dispatched to escort social services to investigate a report of an 8-year-old living without electricity. They knocked on the dented door. No lights shone in the windows.

The door opened.

"The first thing we see is the parents in their winter coats, indoors," said Davis, 39, with 13 years on the job as a deputy. "The bare floor was just plywood. There wasn't much furniture. There wasn't much anything."

Reed, 26, six years on the job, saw the only light: A construction light rigged to a generator. There was a cord that would be moved from the refrigerator to two tiny space heaters, to the light, depending on what needed to be run.

The bathtub was partially filled with water which was used to flush the toilet. There were holes in the floors, the walls, the ceilings, from where a thief long ago had ripped copper wires.

"It was hard to look at it," said Reed, who is built like a kick boxer and has a jaw like Dick Tracy. Davis, his partner, is well over 6 feet tall, far over 200 pounds. It takes a lot to knock these two guys back a step.

But each recoiled.

This was home for Sara Barnstable, 28, her 40-year-old longtime boyfriend Juan Mata-Montes, the father of their 1-year-old daughter, Maddisyn, and her 8-year-old son, Matthew.

The officers looked through the house, as they are required to do. The rest of the mobile home was no better.

The officers called dispatch and had records run on both parents. They found no criminal record in the state, no outstanding warrants, according to state records. Nothing wrong -- except poverty.

They heard how Mata-Montes's work dried up, how the power bill had risen to $576 before it was shut off. How the old mobile home, and another beside it, were purchased as fixer-uppers from a legal settlement after Juan was hit by a car. The couple found the property online, and figured a move from Charlotte to the rural outskirts of Rock Hill was their only chance at the dream of home ownership.

The cops then heard how the money ran out as the economy tanked, how Juan was unable to make repairs, and how the family ran out of hope.

Barnstable begged the cops not to take her kids. Mata-Montes begged the cops not to take the kids. The couple said they knew people in Charlotte, but didn't know if the conditions would be any better.

Davis, the senior officer, said he's had to take many children from homes over the years, and never saw a couple beg, with love in their eyes and faces, as Sara and Juan did.

"It was clear they loved the kids," said Davis.

"They were more distraught, not angry at us," said Reed. "You could see it was they were down on their luck. They didn't try to hide anything."

But the choice was clear, the officers said. The kids could not stay in a home without a working toilet, without electricity with a cold snap looming, holes in the walls.

Barnstable was crying, and Mata-Montes , feeling less than a man, was defeated. The couple told the kids leaving with the DSS worker for emergency foster care to treat it as a sleep-over, a trip.

"We told them to make it fun -- we didn't want the kids to be scared -- they had never been away from us, ever," said Barnstable.

Mata-Montes, a native of a Mexico which has a long, well-documented history of police corruption, saw his children taken away by police. He shook and was physically sick.

"I though the worst -- they were gone forever," he said.

The authorities gave the couple a list of things that must be fixed -- the heat, the water, the holes, floor coverings -- before the kids could possibly be returned.

The kids waved from the window of the DSS vehicle and were taken away.

The couple did not moan and complain or lodge a complaint about cops barging into their house. By lamplight and gas lamp, all through the night Jan. 10 into Jan. 11, They worked next to each other patching the holes in the floor and walls and ceilings.