LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Two Henderson parents were arrested Tuesday after an 11-year-old child diagnosed with autism was found in a makeshift ‘jail cell’ after being absent from school, according to police documents obtained by 8 News Now.
On April 23, at around 10:15 a.m., officers with the City of Henderson Police Department and the Clark County School District Police Department did a welfare check in the 2000 block of Silverton Drive near Wigwam and North Green Valley parkways.
The welfare check was requested due to a truancy, or absence from school, issue involving a student. The truancy officer told police that when they knocked on the door, no one answered, but they could hear a child screaming and a gate rattling inside, according to an arrest report.
When police arrived, it was approximately 40 minutes before the door was answered by Jeffery Scanlan, 41. He told police his children had been absent from school because they were sick, the report stated.
When police asked Jeffery if they could check on the children, he agreed and led them inside, where police found an 11-year-old boy in a “large metal enclosure” with metal bars and locked doors, “similar to a jail cell,” according to the report.
The boy was wearing only a diaper and the enclosure had feces on the floors and walls, the report stated. Jeffery told police that the child was diagnosed with “severe Autism spectrum disorder.”
Three other children were in the home when police arrived. While police were at the home, Jeffery’s wife, Misty Scanlan, 46, got home from work.
Officers said the house was in “extreme disarray and smelled of feces,” the report stated. While searching the home, police found two bedrooms with little or no furniture with feces on the walls, ceilings, and floors. Both bedrooms had exterior locks with no way to open from the inside, according to the report.
One bedroom had a single mattress on the floor while the other bedroom had no furniture at all.
Jeffery told police that the child in the enclosure was “big and strong” and could be very aggressive, destroying the house, punching holes in the wall, and attempting to escape to neighbors’ houses.
Jeffery added that the child goes to school and “does well there, but struggles often at home,” the report stated.
He said the child “prefers” the enclosure to his bedroom and will sleep in it on a couch. He explained to police that he enclosure has two doors, one which is locked all the time and another which is tied shut with string because the child “has not figured out knots yet” and can’t open the door.
When asked if the child would be able to exit in an emergency, Jeffery said someone would have to let him out.
One of the children told police they believed the enclosure had been in the home for “approximately two years.” Jeffery later told police it was actually there for six.
Two children and Misty told police they tried to clean both the enclosure and the bedrooms “once a week,” but that it had been several weeks since they last cleaned.
Jeffery and Misty said one of their other children, who was also diagnosed with autism, was “an escape artist” so they would lock her in her room when it was time to sleep and duct tape the top of her shirt over her diaper so she could not grab feces from it when it had not been changed, the report stated.
Both Jeffery and Misty told police they received referrals from the child’s school, but had not pursued any for any of the children in the home because they did not “know where to start” or “want strangers in [their] house,” according to the report.
Police took both Jeffery and Misty into custody and booked them into the Henderson Detention Center for child abuse/neglect.
The 11-year-old boy was taken to a local hospital and Child Protective Services took the other three children into their custody.
According to court records, the two posted bail on Wednesday morning. The next court appearance is scheduled for May 14.
Anyone with information in this case is urged to call the Henderson Police Department
at 702-267-4911, 3-1-1, or, to remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 702-385-5555
or visit the Crime Stoppers website.