Mother, 22, accused of abandoning two kids at Wilson Homes

A mother accused of leaving her two children alone at her “cluttered” Eighth Avenue home for nearly four hours early Monday appeared in Columbus Recorder’s Court Tuesday morning.

Porshia Senata Hollis, 22, pleaded not guilty to two counts of second-degree child cruelty. She was placed in the Muscogee County Jail under bonds totaling $100,000. Her case was bound over to Superior Court.

Columbus police officer Donald Rambo said he and another officer were responding to an unrelated call to Wilson Homes when he spotted a 4-year-old boy standing in the doorway of an apartment unit. Officials noticed the rear and front door of the apartment were opened.

“I thought it was unusual that the front and rear door were both wide open, so that’s why I started investigating that,” Rambo said.

A neighbor informed Rambo that the child belonged to Hollis, who resides in the an apartment next to the residence where police found the boy.

With his body camera active, Rambo entered the boy’s residence to investigate further. He found the boy’s 3-year-old sister alone in the home, lying on a couch in a diaper heavily soiled with feces, according to police testimony.

A police report indicates that the children had been unsupervised since 12 a.m.

Rambo said both of the children asked him for food, so he gave them a snack. He confirmed that there was plenty of food in the apartment, but there were also cockroaches on “most flat surfaces” in the home along with “heavily soiled and dirty floors.”

“All of the bedrooms were heavily cluttered,” Rambo testified. “One of the children’s beds had a lot of broken items lying on it. There was no way an infant or even a juvenile could sleep in that bed.”

The mother was taken into custody at the home at 6:30 a.m. and transported to the Muscogee County Jail.

Hollis didn’t speak to police following her arrest, but she admitted to the judge that she left her children unsupervised.

“I really don’t have any excuse for why I left my kids at the house,” she told the court before later adding that she feeds her children regularly.

This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 12:18 PM with the headline "Mother, 22, accused of abandoning two kids at Wilson Homes."