Diashae Bizzel, a 31-year-old Southeast Oklahoma City mother, pleaded guilty in late September to two counts of child neglect and was sentenced to 10 years on each count, according to KFOR. The case followed an August incident in which police found her 5-year-old child alone and without clothes outside an apartment complex.
Court papers cited by KFOR say officers searching for the child’s parents found a second child, also without clothes, inside the apartment.
KFOR reported that officers found Bizzel asleep upstairs. The station also reported that the children’s bedroom had a bed without sheets and a dresser that appeared to contain trash rather than clothes.
Conditions Inside the Apartment
Court documents described trash and feces in the apartment, along with bugs and flies, according to KFOR.
KFOR reported that Bizzel said she had cleaned the apartment and had been trying to enroll her children in school. These were her stated explanations, not independently established facts.
Sentencing Includes Jail Time and State Supervision
Bizzel pleaded guilty to the child neglect charges in late September and was sentenced to 10 years on each count. She was ordered to serve three months in jail, with the remainder of her sentence to be spent under state supervision, as reported by KFOR.
Oklahoma health data cited alongside the case notes that neglect accounts for the vast majority of child maltreatment investigations statewide, with roughly 54.5 children per 1,000 subjected to such an investigation and neglect making up 76.9 percent of those cases, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. That figure underscores how often neglect, rather than physical abuse, drives child welfare cases across the state.
Oklahoma Child-Welfare Services
Oklahoma Human Services’ FY21 annual report says the statewide abuse-and-neglect hotline received more than 76,000 calls that year. It describes Family-Centered Services as focused on preventing maltreatment while allowing children to remain with their families and in their communities, according to Oklahoma Human Services. These figures and program details do not specify how often assessed reports lead to services or a child’s removal from home.
Cases involving children found in unsafe or unsupervised conditions have surfaced elsewhere in recent coverage. In Enid, two adults were charged with child neglect after a 9-year-old girl was allegedly kept in a closet with only a bucket for a bathroom, according to KFOR.com Oklahoma City. In Florida, a Hillsborough County father was arrested after five young children were reportedly left unattended, including a 3-year-old found wandering barefoot along a busy roadway, as reported by FOX 13 Tampa Bay.
