Chilling words child told police after six kids were found locked in a storage unit by their parents
Topics: Crime, True crime, US News
Jen Thomas
Featured Image Credit: Milwaukee County Sheriffs Office
Topics: Crime, True crime, US News
Warning: This article contains discussion of child abuse which some readers may find distressing.
In a case of unthinkable cruelty, police officers found children had been locked up in a storage unit.
Officers were called to a storage facility on Tuesday, September 16, after someone made a report about hearing a child crying inside a locked unit.
Police attended the unit, in Milwaukee, and found young children aged just two months, and two, three, five, seven and nine years old.
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A man and a woman have now been charged with two counts of child neglect, and four counts of neglecting a child under six years old.
Charles Dupriest, 33, and Azyia Zielinski, 26, were identified by the 9-year-old child as their parents.
When officers arrived, they heard the child crying plus another coughing, and called the Fire Department to cut the padlock.
Inside, they found a bucket of urine in the middle of the room, along with the six terrified children.
The unit was pitch black, apart from light that came through a crack in the door.
According to the police documentation, the five-year-old child heartbreakingly told the officer: "We're not supposed to be loud."
The 9-year-old child said it was his job to look after the younger kids while his parents were away.
The criminal complaint states that the parents left them alone about 50 percent of the time, and the child was told to give the youngest baby a bottle or a pacifier, or pick her up if she cries.
Police also said the child asked for food as he was hungry, and said he had no way of contacting his parents if there was an emergency.
He said his parents would drink 'tequila and vodka, become drunk, and slump over'.
The child also said Dupriest beat him with 'such force that his lips began to bleed'.
There was a couch and a twin mattress with no bedsheets, which three of the children slept on.
Police reported there was a box of chips, milk, and a case of soda, but no lights, electricity, or running water.
The stench of the unit was described as 'putrid' and was so bad that officers could not bear to stay inside the unit, even with the door open.
An employee of the storage unit said in May 2025, he heard an adult male say 'sit down and be quiet', and he managed to provide surveillance video to police.
The employee reported what he heard to management, who issued an eviction notice.
Police then found Dupriest and Zielinski asleep in an SUV in the parking lot, as per the complaint. They confessed that they slept in the SUV with the dog, while they left the children in the storage unit. The couple told officers they were homeless.
However, they later changed their story and said there were family members the children would have stayed with instead of the horrendous conditions of storage unit.
Zielinski said they had been sleeping in there for a month and a half, despite claiming $2,000 a month in Social Security benefits and food stamps.
They had previously been living in a shelter until they were 'kicked out after she gave birth'.
The couple are now being held on $5,000 cash bail.
A Court Commissioner said: “We have your children stating that they had no food. That the only food they found was from the garbage.
"They didn’t have a bathroom. They used a bucket, and what’s more disturbing than all of that are the statements that both you and father had made that you and the children could have stayed with family members.”