Shalesia Cave (Alachua County Sheriff’s Office).
A Gainesville, Florida, mother is accused of neglecting her three young children after authorities say they were left so frightened and unattended that two of them went to a neighbor’s apartment in the middle of the night believing their mother had died.
According to an arrest report obtained by Law&Crime, Cave’s 6-year-old son, who has autism, was allegedly heard “singing that his mother was dead” after he and a younger sibling sought help from the neighbor around 1 a.m.
Shalesia Cave, 25, was taken into custody early Saturday and charged with three counts of child neglect without causing great bodily harm after officers allegedly discovered her unconscious or passed out in a bathtub inside her apartment.
An officer with the Gainesville Police Department described the encounter in the arrest report, writing:
After I shook and spoke loudly to [Cave], she gradually came to her senses but was still incredibly unaware of her surroundings or her physical state. [Cave] then started crying, slurring her words, and not being able to form understandable sentences.
Police said they responded to Cave’s apartment at about 1 a.m. Saturday after a neighbor called to report that the children had knocked on her door and appeared to be in distress.
“The witness advised that she saw on her Ring camera [Cave’s children] were visibly distraught, knocking on her door stating that their mother was dead,” the arrest report says.
The neighbor says she placed Cave’s children inside her residence and then “rushed” to get another sibling, who was 10-months-old, out of Cave’s home. She called 911 while doing this.
“The witness advised that there was no one else in [Cave’s] residence,” the arrest report states. “[Cave] was the only person that was with her kids.”
Police say the children were “clearly distraught” while speaking with officers. Cave was found “breathing but unresponsive” and naked in her bathtub. It’s unclear what caused her to allegedly pass out.
While speaking to police, Cave “spontaneously uttered that she ignored her kids” earlier in the evening “so that they would go back to sleep,” per the arrest report.
Cave was released on her own recognizance over the weekend after being booked in the Alachua County Jail. She has been ordered to stay away from her children; it’s unclear whose care the kids are under.
The post Mom ‘ignored’ her children until they thought she was dead, her little kids ran over to neighbor’s apartment ‘visibly distraught’: Cops first appeared on Law & Crime.
