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| Screen grab of family photo |
A
divorced man and his seven kids have been found dead in their home on
Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Authorities believe they were poisoned by carbon
monoxide fumes from a generator they used after their electricity was cut off
due to unpaid bills. The bodies of Rodney Todd and his children – two boys and
five girls – were found in their house in Princess Ann, 140 miles to the
southeast of Baltimore, a week after they were last seen alive.
Bonnie
Edwards, Todd’s mother, identified the children as boys Cameron, 13, and
Zycheim, 7, and girls Tynijuiza, 15, Tykira, 12, Tybree, 10, Tyania, 9, and
Tybria, 6. When his divorce with Tyisha
Luniece Chambers was completed last September, Todd got full custody of the
children.
The Washington Post take on the story continues:
Rodney Todd, a 36-year-old man with
a troubled and sometimes violent past, had been relying on a generator since
Delmarva Power discovered what it described as a “stolen electric meter”
attached to his rented Eastern Shore home and removed it on March 25.
That apparently prompted Todd to
find an alternative to power the 1,056-square-foot yellow ranch house, where he
was raising his five daughters and two sons alone in this tough-times town. It
was the carbon monoxide the generator produced, investigators said, that killed
all of them, including Todd, as they slept.
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Home where Todd and his seven children found
dead on Monday
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On Tuesday, Delmarva spokesman Matt
Likovich said that the company discovered two weeks ago that an electric meter
had been stolen from a vacant house and attached to the rental, enabling a
connection to an adjacent power line. Likovich said that Delmarva does not know
who stole the meter or installed it.
“That meter did not belong at that
house and was removed,” Likovich said. “The utility investigator who removed
the stolen meter tells us no one responded to us being out there as we were
removing it or after it was disconnected.”
The home is owned by Gilkerson Properties. When reached by phone,
Christopher S. Gilkerson said he had been advised by his attorney not to
comment.
The discovery of the bodies on
Monday stunned and horrified the family’s loved ones, several of whom said Todd
had become a devoted, loving father. Free from jail for about two years, he got
a job last summer earning US$10 an hour in dining services at the University of
Maryland Eastern Shore to support the children, who ranged in age from 6 to 15.
In rural Somerset County, where more than one in three children live in
poverty, he learned to braid his girls’ hair, and he sometimes skipped meals so
his kids could always eat. He boasted about them on Facebook and acquired an
SUV big enough to tote the whole family.
“My blessin,” he wrote of his
children.
At Christmas, he posted a photo of a
glowing tree surrounded by presents. “This what my kids Christmas look like
this year,” he wrote. He posted a photo in early January of a man holding his
child along with this message: “real MEN take care of their CHILDREN.”
Just six weeks before his death, he
implored his friends to cherish the time they have: “life is never promise[d]
no matter how you look at it.”
On Tuesday morning, a memorial was
growing in front of the houses’s brown front door. Behind the rancher, a pair
of battery-operated toy convertibles, one pink and one purple, were parked in
the grass. Nearby, a pink bicycle lay on its side.
As night fell, a Boy Scout troop
carrying white crosses marched down Antioch Avenue to the house where the
family died. They lifted the police tape and leaned the crosses against the
yellow siding, then placed stuffed animals along the foundation of the house.
No one had seen the family since the
last weekend in March, investigators said. After one of Todd’s co-workers
reported him missing, officers entered the house and found the bodies, said
Princess Anne Police Chief Scott Keller. The power was off, and the generator
had run out of gas.
The news devastated the children’s
mother, Tyisha “Taisha” Chambers, 36, who lives in Denton, Md., her sister
said. Chambers could not be reached to comment.
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Lloyd Edwards, left, and Bonnie
Edwards, the stepfather and mother of Rodney Todd, stand outside the home where
Todd and his seven children found dead on Monday. (Juliet Linderman/AP)
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Family members and friends
identified the boys as Cameron Todd and ZhiHeem Todd; and the girls as
Tyjuziana, Tykeria, TyNijuzia, TyNiah and TyBreyia Todd.
Five of the seven children attended
Princess Anne Elementary School, Keller said, who added that grief counselors
were sent Tuesday to the elementary school, Somerset Intermediate School and
Washington High School.
Todd had a troubled history with the
law, including a number of alleged altercations with his now ex-wife, court
records show. In 2011, Chambers accused him of stabbing her in the face. He was
later convicted of second-degree assault and spent a year in jail and 18 months
on probation.
Although Todd’s friends say that
Chambers was largely absent from the children’s lives over the past two years,
she often spoke to them on the phone, even when she briefly left for the West
Coast, her sister said.
“It wasn’t like she left them and
didn’t care,” Latoya Baltimore said. “At the end of the day, I don’t care how
far away, she never stopped being their mom.”
Chambers filed for divorce from Todd
in February 2012 after the assault conviction. “I just want nothing else from
or to do with him,” she wrote in black ink on the complaint. The divorce was
finalized last year.
“He had an anger problem,” said
Angela Collins, a family friend. “But he was all about taking care of his
kids.”
Family members said that when Todd
got out of jail a couple of years ago, he took custody of his children.
“He did a 100 percent turnaround,”
his mother, Bonnie Edwards, said Monday night. “He told the girls to be young
ladies. He taught the boys to be men. If he didn’t know something, he would
call me. He’d say, ‘Mom.’ ”
She stopped. Standing in front of
the house where her son and grandchildren died, Edwards burst into tears.
Collins, who was a teaching
assistant in ZhiHeem’s class, offered tiny biographies of each child.
Tyjuziana was a popular
ninth-grader, she said: “She was a girly girl. . . . She was a good student.
She had a lot of friends. Everybody liked her.”
Cameron, an eighth-grader who had
already grown to 6-foot-3, played basketball and football.
Tykeria went by Kayla. “She was a
diva,” Collins said. “She had to have her hair done. Kayla would not leave the
house until her hair was done.”
TyNijuzia: “They called her Eyes
because she had big eyes,” she said. “Eyes was my favorite. She was the
sweetest.”
TyNiah: “They called her Duker.
Duker was bossy,” Collins remembered. “She ran everything.”
ZhiHeem was in first grade: “They
called him Bart. He was sneaky,” his classroom aide said. “He was always up to
something. Always somewhere lurking behind the couch.”
TyBreyia, the youngest of the brood:
“She was the baby,” Collins said. “I can see her with her thumb in her mouth.”
Todd had requested help with utility
bills in the past, according to local nonprofit group Shore Up. But he had not
asked for support in nearly a year.
On March 25, Delmarva officials
discovered that electricity was being used at a home in Todd’s neighborhood
where power had been shut off. A utility worker went to the home and discovered
that the meter had vanished.
Company investigators then tracked
it to Todd’s home, where service had been disconnected in October by the
customer of record at that time, the company said. Todd’s family moved in the
same month, but no one requested that power be restored.
Maryland utility regulations say
that service can be terminated without notice for a “customer’s unauthorized
use of service by any method, including diversion of gas or electricity around
a meter,” and that applies even during extreme temperatures, said Paula Carmody
of Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel, which advocates for consumers.
On Monday, police found power cords
throughout Todd’s rental house that led to the generator.
His stepfather, Lloyd Edwards, said
he didn’t think that Todd knew he had to ventilate the house when using the
machine. Carbon monoxide is a deadly, colorless and odorless gas. Running a
generator produces the gas, and warnings are issued routinely against using
them indoors.
“That is what killed them,” Edwards
said. “It’s like putting a hose to a car.”
Keller said the kids were found in
their beds: “It was like the children fell asleep and never woke up.”
On Saturday, the youngest, TyBreyia, would have
turned 6.
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