Kentucky’s Department of Child Services is likely to come under scrutiny again after it’s been revealed that the state knew of abuse in the home of a child who was found dead inside an Owensboro storage unit.
The Evansville Courier and Press reports 32-year-old Jose Gomez-Alvarez and 27-year-old Cheyanne Porter were arrested October 3 in Owensboro for abuse of a corpse after police recovered the girl’s remains from an Extra Space Storage unit off New Hartford Road.
Police now say the child died months earlier in Evansville after about a year of abuse inflicted by Porter and Alvarez.
The victim’s two siblings, both under the age of 12, told police of abuse that included starvation and the victim’s sister said Porter laughed and said “we killed one of them” when the girl fell over and stopped breathing.
Evansville Police Department detectives tell the Courier and Press that the Kentucky Department of Child Services had “numerous” assessments on file for Porter and Gomez-Alvarez from their time in Owensboro tracing back to at least February 2021, a year before their child died.
One report to DCS from February of last year included information that Porter called the victim who would later die a vulgar name and that she was making her sleep on the floor in feces. The caller also said Porter would make her children stay in a closet when they misbehaved.
Three months later a caller to DCS reportedly said porter was keeping the same girl locked in her room, calling her “the Devil’s child.” None of the children had been enrolled in school since 2019, according to documents obtained by the paper.
According to Evansville detectives, Kentucky DCS “only made contact with Porter and the children over the phone,” following this report and “never substantiated any claims.”
Gomez and Porter are currently in the Daviess County Jail and there’s a warrant to extradite them to Evansville, where they will be held without bond.
