A woman from Wisconsin received a very short prison term after she pleaded no contest to neglecting her 72-year-old mother, who was found living in squalor while the woman focused on running a local true crime website.
Elizabeth A. Drake, 40, accepted the charges of deliberately neglecting a vulnerable person and inadequate animal care. According to Law&Crime, she was sentenced to a year in prison plus an additional nine months in jail, along with three years of extended supervision. She was also instructed to avoid any contact with her elderly mother.
The shocking scenario came to light on December 13, 2023, when a delivery person alerted 911 after hearing “an elderly woman banging on windows, shouting for help and to call the police,” as documented in a complaint from that time. When Green Bay law enforcement arrived, Drake greeted them at the front porch, claiming her mother was okay. An officer insisted on checking, and Drake mentioned that the room was “messy.”
“Messy” didn’t begin to cover what the officers found. The entire home was cluttered and had a “very obnoxious smell,” described as “animal, garbage, urine, and feces.” A mattress and blankets covered the floor, which the officers were forced to walk on instead of the floor. “Bugs were all over the home,” the officers wrote, and one said the place was so disgusting that “[I] felt that I may vomit.”
And all that was before arriving at the mother’s bedroom, where Drake told them she was.
Once in the bedroom, the officers couldn’t immediately see the elderly woman because of “the amount of garbage and other items in the room,” which included “soiled diapers, garbage, clothes, pop cans and other miscellaneous items.”
They found the woman with “bed sores, urine material stuck to her hair, and what looked to be bug droppings on her.” She told them that she’d fallen a year ago and broken her leg and that her daughter was “supposed to take care of her,” but she had not been taken out of the bed for bathing or using the restroom in “at least a year.”
Drake acknowledged that that home was in “terrible condition” but claimed that her mother “chose” to live in it. When she was arrested, she asked for an attorney, but kept talking to police, telling them that she “ignores her mom’s cries for help” because they bother her while she runs her crime blog.
She said that ashe had considered sound-proofing her mother’s room so no one could hear her screams for hlep and that she was “happy this happened” so the poor woman could be removed from her care.
With her slap-on-the-wrist sentence, she’ll be back soon to that crime blog. where she wrote about her arrest before the site was taken down.
