Posted on 09/28/2002 10:27:57 AM PDT by Sunshine55
Abused and starving, Chester Lee Miller, 18, was forced sometime this month to make a desperate 1,000-mile bus journey from the home of his mother and stepfather in Hazleton, Pa., to the Florida Panhandle, a place from which his natural father had earlier sent him packing.
Aboard the bus, in terminal after terminal, town after town, Miller said, he cried and begged strangers for help.
No one listened.
Weighing little more than 60 pounds, the famished teenager with sunken eyes finally arrived in Milton, Fla., about 20 miles north of Pensacola, only to be rejected again. There, authorities said, his relatives shut him out of their trailer home on Saturday and literally dumped him at an apartment complex.
"He looked like a Holocaust victim," said Janice Goodman, at whose door Miller knocked, pleading again for help. "I never would have thought something like this would be in Florida or the United States."
Goodman tried to help Miller, but he was by then beyond help.
Severely malnourished and succumbing to extensive organ failure, the youth died alone yesterday in a Florida hospital room.
His mother and stepfather, Lyda Miller, 37, and Paul Hoffman Sr., 38, who were charged earlier this week with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, face additional charges, police said last night: homicide.
And in Milton, population 7,400, the stranger who took in the dying boy nobody wanted said her family is trying to raise money for a funeral.
"We're trying to at least let him have a decent burial," Goodman said. "It's the least we can do." A relative of her family has donated a burial plot.
Though still hazy, the picture emerging of Chester Lee Miller's life is one of suffering and torture.
Before he died, Miller was able to tell authorities that his father, Robert Lee Miller, dispatched him to Pennsylvania last year to live with his mother and stepfather in Hazleton, about 120 miles north of Philadelphia. He told of being kept mostly in one room, often forced to stand for hours in a corner, being beaten every day, fed only scraps of food, and not allowed out of the house to go to school or see friends.
Charged earlier this week, the mother and stepfather remained jailed last night under $500,000 bond each. Hazleton Police Chief Edward Harry said that within a week, investigators would upgrade the charges against them to homicide.
Angry and sickened, Luzerne County District Justice Joseph Zola reacted with outrage at the couple in his courtroom on Tuesday. According to a report in a local newspaper, Zola looked at photographs of the emaciated, 5-foot, 3-inch teenager and said: "Did you see these? Do you believe this? This is so bad. How can people do this?"
Hoffman told the judge that he was on disability for mental illness and was "deeply sorry" for his actions. "I have no idea why I did it," he said.
In court papers, the couple admitted forcing the teenager to stand in a corner of their house for as long as 12 hours at a time. If he moved, Hoffman would hit him, according to the affidavit of probable cause.
Zola made the defendants stand in a corner of his courtroom throughout Tuesday's hearing.
In Florida, Janice Goodman's brother, Charles Blanchard, said Miller told them that his mother and stepfather had made him sign a paper saying they had not starved or abused him.
"It's a shame that something like this could happen in this country. I've never seen anybody who looked like that - never seen anybody in that condition.
"Somebody begs for help, nobody helps him, and lets him starve like that," Blanchard said, incredulously. "He begs for help and nobody helps."
Blanchard and Goodman said that when young Miller went to his uncle's house on Saturday, the uncle told him he couldn't stay. A friend of the uncle's drove the youth to Goodman's apartment complex.
"He just happened to knock on her door," Blanchard said.
Goodman said Miller, who could barely stand, asked if he could come in, have a shower and get some sleep. "I said, 'Come on in.' There was no way you could turn your back on him."
Goodman then called her mother, who called police. Officers took one look at Miller and called for an ambulance.
He was taken to the Santa Rosa (County) Medical Center. Goodman and other members of her family visited him daily. Miller underwent intestinal surgery and had to be revived Monday after his heart stopped beating.
Goodman and her family said they had expected him to survive and were shocked to learn of his death yesterday morning.
Police in Hazleton and Milton are trying to put together the details of Miller's life and death.
According to Milton Police Detective Mike Daughtery, Miller said "he'd been here about a week and a half. But right now, we're thinking he wasn't in his right mind. We don't think he was here nearly that long."
Investigators believe that the Pennsylvania neglect started in May, Harry said.
Two other children living with the couple in Hazleton were turned over to a state social-service agency Tuesday, police said. They were in good health.
Investigators said they had located Miller's birth father and planned to interview him.
An autopsy will be conducted in Florida tomorrow. Luzerne County District Attorney David Lupas said yesterday that he was sending investigators to Milton to be on hand when the postmortem is conducted.
"It's awful," Lupas said. "It's one of the most horrible cases of abuse I've ever seen."
Regardless, I would try to do what I could or I couldn't live with myself.
That person who finally tried to help him, too late, deserves a heavenly reward.
"Whoever receives you receives me, 17 and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
There are great many heartless people around us. Unfortunately, in our increasingly "post-Christian" and "post-Jewish" society, people we have unlearned to recognize evil. Even its existence surprises us.
We all wish the world were different, but it is not: uncle's friend drove the kid to some apartment complex because the family did not want him. That's all.
Now you get to live the rest of your life knowing you were responsible for your son starving to death far, far from "home". Hey, but at least you're alive.
Megadittoes, as they say on Rush. The same principle is at work across many sectors of our bloated unfocused welfare state. The undeserving soak up the resources and the real emergency cases are shut out.
Like you, I ignore the scams run by the professional beggars infesting parts of my own city. In this particular case, however, the kid was not doing a lot of the things typically associated with modern mendicants. He wasn't sitting on the sidewalk in the financial district, begging from the curb in front of a liquor store, et cetera. It's truly hard to understand what happened on those buses from Pennsylvania to Florida. Five foot three and 62 pounds???
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PUBLISHED SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2002
Autopsy reveals few clues in suspected starvation death
Toxicology results may take 8 weeks
Carmen Paige@PensacolaNewsJournal.com
It could be two months before police investigators know exactly why 18-year-old Chester Lee Miller died.
A three-hour autopsy Friday revealed Miller was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 100 pounds - nearly 40 pounds more than estimated when he was taken to Santa Rosa Medical Center a week ago.
A toxicology report is needed to determine the entire cause of his death, and that could take six to eight weeks.
Miller's mother, Lyda, 37, and her boyfriend, Paul Hoffman Sr., 38, of Hazleton, Pa., have been arrested. They are accused of starving and abusing him.
"I only have a partial cause of death," said Dr. Andi Minyard, associate medical examiner for District I. "It will be listed as peritonitis due to a gastric rupture due to ... and that's the part I don't know yet - why his stomach ruptured."
Peritonitis is inflammation of the membrane that lines the wall of the abdomen and covers the abdominal organs, according to the American Medical Association's Encyclopedia of Medicine. It is a serious, usually acute and painful condition, almost always rooted in bacterial infection caused by another abdominal disorder.
An 18-year-old male who is 5 feet 4 inches tall should weigh 140 to 150 pounds, said Dr. E.W. Sutton, medical director at the Santa Rosa County Health Department in Milton.
"It sounds like his stomach ruptured, and he had an infection inside the cavity," Sutton said. "It could be connected to starvation. Or, perhaps after he starved for a long period, he ate a lot and that created a problem. Either way, it could be connected to starvation, if in fact he was starved."
Minyard said Miller's weight does seem low but said more study is needed.
"We'll be looking to see if he ingested any toxic substances," she said. "Then, we'll wait for more investigation from the police standpoint."
Miller arrived in Milton by bus from Pennsylvania a week ago, looking for his father, Robert Lee Miller. Janice Goodman let him into her home after he knocked on her door asking for a shower and a nap. Miller told her he was dropped off at the Quinn Bayou apartment complex and told to go find his father.
Goodman said he "looked like a Holocaust victim." Goodman called her mother, Norma Douglas, who in turn contacted the Milton Police Department. Emergency medical service was notified, and Miller was taken to Santa Rosa Medical Center, where he died Wednesday morning.
This case is being investigated by the Hazleton Police Department. The charges against Lyda Miller and Hoffman could be upgraded to homicide, depending on the results of the toxicology report. They are charged with aggravated assault, simple assault and recklessly endangering another person, and they are jailed in the Luzerne County Correctional Facility in lieu of $500,000 cash bail each.
Services for Chester Lee Miller are set for 1 p.m. Monday at Pace Assembly of God Church in Pace. Trahan Mortuary Services of Pensacola is handling the arrangements. Miller will be buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Pensacola. Each organization donated its services.
"It will be a public service," said the Rev. Glyn Lowery, pastor of Pace Assembly of God. "We have schoolteachers who want to come but can't because of the time of the service. They will send a written story, and it will be read from the pulpit. The story will give a little bit of background about the tragedy of this little boy's life."
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