Horror emerges from details coming to light about the case of a family with six children aged three to 11 years old who were living under deplorable conditions, even among filth, in a rooftop room of a building in Peristeri. The parents of the six children in Peristeri were arrested on prosecutor’s orders for endangering minors but were released, while the case was placed under investigation by social services.
“If twins come with a single stroller without an umbrella when it’s raining outside, if a family of six people sleep, as it ultimately appeared, on mattresses on the floor, let’s say, in one room and if the children due to these conditions have accumulated many absences, well the many absences are what started the whole thing,” emphasized the director of the children’s school on Live News of Mega, who made the first complaint about the conditions under which the family was living.
“These little children, unfortunately, surely must have caught pneumonia, there’s no way around it. It’s not possible, it was a horrifying situation,” he said and added:
“When you live in one room, with closed shutters, windows with cardboard boxes nailed over the windows so that no light enters at all, so that no one can see them and you report this. You start the procedures and then they give them back again. What can I tell you now? Does the system work? It doesn’t work.”
“As the social service said, they found the two rooms full of things, boxes piled up, supposedly because they were ready to move if they found a house, which they never found. The kitchen unusable, the bathroom semi-unusable. What else can I tell you?” he commented.
“They had one room for mattresses on the floor, with full humidity on the walls and no sunlight inside. What can I tell you now? And we said that this situation is not for children, which the social worker also saw. The process proceeded, they took them for a week, two and then gave them back again,” he concluded.
Mother’s testimony about the horror with children in Peristeri: “We gave them clothes but they wore the same dirty and torn ones”
Shocking regarding the children’s condition is also the testimony of a mother of their classmates.
“We gave them how many bags of clothes, the entire school year has passed, we haven’t seen the children wear one of the clothes we gave. My mother-in-law happened to see the woman who came down with the stroller once, twice, three times. She saw her with the many little children. At some point she tells us: ‘Stop, my girl,’ she says, ‘I want you.’ And she gave her a bag of food, pasta, rice, sauce, sugar, everything,” said a mother of the children’s classmates on Live News.
“When the Social Service of the Municipality of Peristeri went to the house, however, they said the kitchen was found, but in which kitchen no food had ever been cooked. It was completely unusable. The house messy, without beds, without sleeping on the floor. And then he had said they don’t cook because dad works at a hotel and brings food from there,” she added.
“Every time I encountered the dad on the street, because sometimes I had encountered him sleeping in the car, an old red car. Every time I encountered the dad on the street, I would see him eating either a packaged sandwich or some croissant. That is, always something the dad would bring you on the street. It was also two meters. He was a tough guy,” she mentioned.
“Everything neglected, neglected, dirty, torn. I can tell you they were in the same clothes all year, same shoes. They didn’t take them off all day long. I can’t understand how it doesn’t smell. That is, they washed them with plain water and put them back on. That is, they would come near you and the smell wouldn’t come to you even though you knew this person is completely unwashed. I can’t explain this,” she added.
The children’s grandmother seeks their custody
“My son-in-law had called me saying they found a house. In two days they were going to move in, but because the tenants who had told them hadn’t left yet and they wanted to put the water and electricity in their name, that’s why they hadn’t moved in yet and were staying with his father-in-law. Where would they go to stay on the street?” says the children’s grandmother, mother of their mother.
“They had taken the children again another time. Again to a house. They were ready then again to go downstairs and had prepared the boxes, had closed the house, had closed everything. And they went suddenly and took the children. I want to get custody of my grandchildren,” she says.
