Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says he has ordered a review of city services for homelessness to make sure a tragedy that happened Monday is never repeated. Two children, ages two and nine, froze to death while sleeping in a van in a casino parking structure, the Detroit News reports. Duggan said Tuesday that their mother reached out to the city's homeless response team, most recently in November. Police say five children, their mother, and their grandmother were in a van that parked on the ninth floor of the Hollywood Casino's parking structure around 1am Monday, reports the Detroit Free Press. The van stopped running in the middle of the night, apparently due to a mechanical failure, police say.
Police say that after a family friend came to help, the mother discovered around noon that her 9-year-old son wasn't breathing. After the friend took the boy to a hospital, the grandmother found out that a 2-year-old girl also wasn't breathing. The three other children were hospitalized. Interim Police Chief Todd Bettison said the family had been living in the van for around three months, moving from casino to casino, WXYZ reports. Duggan said Tuesday that beds were available at a shelter a few miles from the casino. He said the city needs to work to make sure people know how to access services. "We have to make sure that we do everything possible to make sure that this doesn't happen again," he said.
Duggan said the family didn't contact the homeless response team again after the November call and outreach workers didn't follow it up because their situation was not deemed to be an emergency. Detroit Board of Police Commissioner Tamara Liberty Smith says the family contacted multiple shelters before the tragedy and were told they were full, the Free Press reports. She says the grandmother works at Popeye's and the mother had been due to start a job in Flint on Wednesday. "They're a family that's trying. They didn't want to abandon each other," Smith says. (More Detroit stories.)
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