The Carnival Conquest left PortMiami on Friday, September 25, bound for the Bahamas. Three nights, back Monday morning.
According to North Miami Beach police, Nathalie Belizaire, 29, was on it.
According to the same police, her four children were not. They were in her apartment. Alone. The youngest was two months old. The next was two years old.
When officers finally forced their way inside, all four were hiding together in the bathroom.
How anyone found out.
The father of the two-month-old saw a WhatsApp story on September 24 that appeared to show a Carnival Cruise Line ticket. He asked Belizaire about it.
She told him she would be dropping the children off at their great-grandmother's house.
She did not. Police later spoke with the great-grandmother, who confirmed she had been told the kids were coming and that they never arrived.
On September 26 the father went to the apartment. He could see the television glowing through the blinds. He could hear the children's voices inside.
Nobody answered the door.
First responders forced entry. The arrest report states that all four minor children were found inside without adult supervision, hiding together in the bathroom.
Police were waiting at the port on Monday when the ship came in. She was arrested walking off the gangway and booked into Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on four felony counts of child neglect.
The bond hearing is where it gets remarkable.
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Mindy Glazer had trouble getting through the file.
"You cannot make this up," she said. "Who leaves four little kids alone to go on a cruise? The poor kids were home alone."
Belizaire's public defender did his job, which in this case meant standing in a courtroom and arguing that these are only allegations his client denies.
Glazer's response was six words.
"They arrested her disembarking from the cruise ship!"
The defense then tried a different angle, offering that it is not only mothers who are in charge of children, Judge.
That is a true statement. It is also not a defense to the question of who was on the boat.
Glazer set bond at $10,000 and ordered no contact with the children, directly or indirectly, in person, in writing, by telephone or through third parties, and ordered Belizaire to stay at least 500 feet from them at home and at school.
The part that is not funny at all.
Strip away the cruise ship and the judge's incredulity and look at what the bodycam footage actually shows.
Four children, aged two months to grade school, walked out of an apartment by police officers. They had been in there for the better part of three days. When adults finally came through the door, their instinct was to hide in the bathroom together.
A two-month-old cannot roll over reliably. It cannot lift its own head for long, reposition itself, get water, or make a sound loud enough to matter through a closed apartment door. Whatever care that infant received over those three days came from siblings who are themselves small children.
That is the case. Everything else is commentary.
One note on process.
Belizaire has been charged, not convicted, and she is entitled to the presumption of innocence like anyone else. We have applied that standard in these pages to people considerably less sympathetic and we are not abandoning it now.
But the presumption of innocence is a rule about what the state must prove in a courtroom. It is not a rule requiring the rest of us to pretend we cannot read an arrest report.
The affidavit says she told the father the children would be at their great-grandmother's. It says the great-grandmother never received them. It says officers found four kids alone in a bathroom while their mother was on a boat in international waters.
A jury will decide what that adds up to.
The judge already had a pretty good idea.
- Article Source:
FOX News
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