Police arrested a Bloomington mother on a felony charge of child neglect after she left her 6-year-old son unattended for several hours late Tuesday night.
Kyla Armour, 25, is being held at the Monroe County Jail in leiu of $4,500 bail. The Department of Child Services removed the child from his mother and placed him in the care of a grandparent.
In the apartment at the 2300 block of South Winslow Court, where Armour lived with her son, officers also discovered paraphernalia and a plastic bag with the remnants of marijuana, Bloomington Police Department Sgt. Joe Crider said.
At about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, BPD received a call from a 59-year-old woman about a small child who was wandering alone in a common area of the apartment complex.
The boy was looking for his mother, Crider said.
Armour, his mother, allegedly put him to sleep in his bed and left the apartment to go to her boyfriend’s apartment in the same building.
The child woke up and became alarmed when he couldn’t find his mother, Crider said. The boy went looking for her and started knocking on the doors of neighbors.
For more than an hour, officers called multiple phone numbers associated with Armour but could not reach her or find her in the apartment complex.
They finally reached her after calling a phone number belonging to her 26-year-old boyfriend, Crider said.
Armour claimed she was at her aunt’s apartment for about 10 minutes. She later admitted she was at her boyfriend’s residence, but said she was gone for only 20 minutes and had asked her boyfriend to check on her son.
“There were discrepancies in her accounts and timelines,” Crider said.
Officials believe she left her son alone for several hours, Crider said.
Because of the span of time the son was unattended, as well as the presence of drugs and smoking devices in her apartment, the neglect of the child rose to the level of a felony arrest, Crider said.
Samantha Schmidt
