Two North Texas parents are behind bars and facing a host of charges related to the health of their infant son. The 8-month-old was found emaciated and living in filth, according to police reports.
The child’s condition was first noticed by a 17-year-old who was attending a gathering over the weekend at a mobile home near the town of Granbury.
Magon Rutledge said she heard the baby’s tiny cries from a back bedroom. She demanded to know if his parents, 21-year-olds Justin and Brittany Alston, were going to check on him.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Justin, your baby’s crying.’ He’s like, ‘He’ll go back to sleep. He’ll go back to sleep,” Rutledge said.
No one moved so she went to the bedroom.
“I have never been so enraged in my entire life at what I saw,” Rutledge said.
The 8-month-old was emaciated and weak, lying on a bed covered in filth, according to police reports.
“I wouldn’t let my dog sleep on this bed. It was so horrible,” Rutledge said.
She said the baby’s socks were so dirty they meshed with the skin.
“It was like they were a part of him. They weren’t socks anymore,” she said.
She said she knew she had to get him help so she told her cousin to call his dad, a paramedic.
Carefully, she changed his clothes.
“I was furious and I was shaking and I was breathing hard and I was trying to be as gentle as I could with this baby because I felt like if I just moved a certain way this baby would break. He was so fragile and little,” Rutledge said. “He had these big blue eyes and they were so bright but the rest of him was just like he was gone.”
Rutledge put the baby in a carseat.
“I didn’t want to lay him in this carseat. It smelled and it was dirty,” she said.
Her uncle drove him to a local hospital and later he was airlifted to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth. He remains in critical condition.
Despite finding the baby and getting him help, the teen doesn’t consider herself a hero.
“I don’t think it’s outstanding or anything like that. I did what any human being would’ve done if they were in the same circumstances I was,” she said.
Justin and Brittany Alston are now facing charges for injury to a child and abandoning or endangering a child.
Also, Brittany Alston’s 18-month-old daughter has been placed in foster care and a relative was given custody of her 4-year-old child.
