Background: The cluttered conditions inside the Washington, D.C., home where the children were found (Superior Court of the District of Columbia/WTTG/YouTube). Inset: Valencia Duke (Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia/WTTG/YouTube).
A mother in Washington, D.C., is accused of letting her twin toddlers starve in a filthy apartment before one of them began to decompose and the other barely managed to survive.
Valencia Duke, 25, is charged with first-degree felony murder in the death of her 13-month-old daughter, Mazouri Jones. Duke is also charged with two counts of cruelty to children.
The Metropolitan Police Department said that on Jan. 18 at about 6 p.m., its officers were called to an apartment on the 4700 block of Southern Avenue in the city "for the report of an unconscious child." When officers arrived, they found Mazouri and a 13-month-old boy inside.
The little girl was decomposing, and the boy — her twin brother — was severely malnourished and dehydrated, according to court documents obtained by local Fox affiliate WTTG. Duke had allegedly left the twins completely alone in the apartment for the better part of the past four days, spending only two hours with them inside the home over the course of 92 hours, according to area ABC affiliate WJLA
Mazouri was pronounced dead at the scene, while the boy was rushed to a nearby hospital. He was apparently so starved that he tried to eat the paramedic's stethoscope, believing it was food, and had hypothermia and ribs protruding from his body, per WJLA.
On April 3, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in D.C. ruled Mazouri's cause of death to be "dehydration and malnourishment due to neglect and the manner of death a homicide," police said. Officers arrested Duke on Wednesday.
Photos in court documents depict the cluttered space where the twins were forced to live. There was laundry around the playpen where the girl was found, filthy food strewn throughout, and there was apparently crack cocaine in the living space.
Duke appeared in court on Thursday, and her attorney reportedly said that she is 13 weeks pregnant. She is scheduled to appear again for a preliminary hearing on June 11.