Californian police stumbled across the makeshift shelter in the Joshua Tree desert last week they made a shocking discovery: three children were living in a plywood box. There appeared to be no electricity, no running water and not enough food but piles of rubbish and human feces, a scene of squalor and isolation. There was no record of the children attending school.
The parents, Mona Kirk, 51, and Daniel Panico, 73, were charged with three felony counts of child abuse and the children were put in care of social services.Friends defended them as good, caring parents, guilty only of being poor. Neighbours have rallied outside the Joshua Tree courthouse with placards saying “Guilty of being poor”, “Being homeless is not a crime” and “Poverty is not a choice”.
“The story when it first came out, it was wrong. I just cried. This is not them, they’re really good people,” Jackie Klear, who has known the family for 10 years, said on Wednesday. “They’ve always put their kids first. They’re fed, well dressed, educated. They’re in my scout troop.” The family, she said, had fallen on hard times but chose self-reliance over state help or charity. Instead of building a house on their five-acre property, as originally planned, they slept in a trailer and in an improvised 200 sq ft shelter made of plywood, tin and sheeting. The property was unsightly. “It looks like a mess but it’s an organised mess.” There was a water tank, a generator, furniture and protection from the elements, she said. “It’s warm in there.” They liked living off the grid and embodied a frontier spirit, said Klear. “They didn’t want any kind of help. Their belief was ‘we don’t need it, we can make it, others need it more than us’.”
“We are just minding our own business, trying to raise our three kids on little money,” Panico told the Los Angeles Times. The family had no regular income. Panico reportedly is an inventor, with a patent for a whirling children’s toy and a pending patent application for another device. Kirk used to run a children’s programme until she quit to raise and home school her own children.
The case has spotlit the responsibilities of impoverished parents and authorities in a state with some of the worst poverty and homeless rates in the United States – a California far removed from the wealth of Silicon Valley and glitz of Hollywood. Authorities must now decide if raising children in dustbowl-era conditions constitutes neglect if help is available but spurned.
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