Washington, DC – Whoa. U.S. Marshals that were “serving an eviction notice” in a southeast DC apartment building January 9 smelled something really, really rank. When they investigated the smell, they did not find mice in the air ducts or someone’s lost guinea pig. What they did find was pretty heinous, even for Washington.
The decomposing corpses of four young girls were found in the apartment, where their mother, Banita Jacks, 33, had been living.  With the dead bodies of her daughters, 5-year-old Aja Fogle, 6-year-old N’Kiah Fogle, 11-year-old Britney Jacks and 17-year-old Tatianna Jacks.   For weeks, possibly months.
Can I just stop a minute and get a group “EWWWWWW”?
It took a full day for the medical examiner to determine gender and sort-of-maybe cause of death. The oldest daughter, Tatianna, was apparently stabbed in the abdomen.  Aja, N’Kiah and Britney were suffocated or perhaps poisoned.
When the bodies are so far gone that the medical examiner can’t tell what sex they are, much less cause of death, that’s bad. And Mom was just hanging out in the house? Banita makes Andrea Yates look like the poster child for sane parenting.Â
There appear to have been some serious problems in the family – the father died a year ago, the family had been on the streets part of the time. Banita appears to have lost her shit sometime within the last few months as well. She’s told investigators that her daughters were “beginning to die” when their electricity was cut off and reportedly trotted out the “my kids were possessed so I had to destroy them” story as well. Honestly, that one’s getting old. Can’t we get a new, more interesting breed of crazy?
Details are still forthcoming, and I’ll edit as I have more information – like why it takes U.S. marshals to serve an eviction notice, and where the apartment super was, and why nobody noticed four kids missing long enough to stank like that. Â Even former DC mayor and cokehound Marion Berry thinks somebody should have been clued in on this one, and when Marion Berry is pissed off, y’all, someone is gonna pay.
 The three older girls attended Meridian Public Charter School until March 2007, when their mother decided to “home school them”. Yeah, that didn’t work out. School officials reported truancy at various times, but there doesn’t seem to have been any serious attempt to find out why the girls weren’t in school or why an often-homeless mother would homeschool her children.
Jacks had been described by neighbors as a large woman, but she was considerably thinner when removed from the apartment yesterday.   I originally posted that the mother probably killed her daughters, kept the bodies around, and lost weight from the smell. Unfortunately, it looks like I was right.
And, as is becoming all too normal, police say that neighbors did express concern for the girls in that home, and did contact DC Child and Family Services, who says that they closed the case after being told that the family had “moved to Maryland”, but also now admits that “we lost them”.  Gee, yathink?Â
Tags: Child Murder, Filicide
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