Children Found In Kennels Inside Grandmother's Car, Woman Charged With Child Endangerment

A video clip uploaded on social media, showing two young children climbing out of dog kennels placed inside the back of a car in 3700 block of Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee, on Saturday, led to the arrest of the victims’ grandmother, who was driving the vehicle at the time.

Leimome Cheeks, 62, admitted to driving with her grandchildren, aged 9 and 8, from Whitehaven to Collierville, while the latter sat in kennels at the back of her vehicle. She was charged with two counts of child endangerment.

The children told the police their grandmother had told them to get inside the kennel because there was no room inside the car to accommodate them. They also confessed that they felt extremely hot sitting inside the kennels because there were no vents for air.

The following video was recorded by a concerned citizen whose identity was not revealed.

People in the neighborhood where Cheeks lives, told CBS affiliated WREG they were shocked by the woman’s actions as she seemed like a perfectly good lady. "I'm still shocked. I really can't see her doing that. She's such a nice lady. Wow,” Skylark Blake, one of the neighbors said.

The neighbors said Cheeks was a woman of faith who had recently bought two puppies and that would explain why she bought the kennels.

Similar instances of child abuse have been observed in the past. In September last year, two caregivers, Gale D. Lalonde, 47, and Dale A. Deavers, 48, were arrested for allegedly keeping a nine-year-old girl in a dog kennel in Wisconsin. Investigators found that the young girl was locked up in a padlocked cage throughout a week, for 12 hours a day, at the residence of the caregivers.

Both Lalonde and Deavers were charged with causing mental harm to a child and false imprisonment among other charges.

Racine County Sheriff’s Office released a press statement at the time, in which Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said: “I was sickened at what I witnessed last night. This by far, is one of the most disturbing and heart-wrenching cases of child abuse I’ve seen, it doesn't get much worse than this. I wouldn't treat my own dog that way.”

In a different case in May 2017, a Virginia woman was arrested after the police found her two sons — aged five and two — locked inside “kennel”-like enclosures inside their home. Both the victims were naked and surrounded by their own filth.

Describing the dire condition in which the boys were discovered, First Class Trooper N.M. Manolakos of the West Virginia State Police said at the time: “The way that these children were pinned up, caged up, however you want to say it, it was the worst I’d ever seen, bar none. No bedding, no bed, no mattress, feces scattered all over the wall. Horrible conditions … more like a kennel than a room for a child.”