My job as an entertainment blogger doesn’t give me many opportunities to talk about social issues. If they’re in a movie or a T.V. show, they’re fair game - otherwise, who cares? If people want to read the true stories that lurk behind some of our best entertainment, they’ll go elsewhere.

I happen to think that this story is very, very important. Not necessarily from a social activism standpoint - though there are elements of that as well - but from an “all humans should know about this” angle. It’s just a story that needs to be told, and if I can get it out to people who haven’t seen it before, then I’m happy.

Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, touched on the issue of child abuse. What, exactly, is the line between neglect and abuse? When do you make the choice to let someone raise their kids their way, versus making the government step in for the good of the child? These questions are raised but not answered in the Oscar-nominated film. Hopefully, Dani’s story will help provide some answers. Everything I’m about to write is 100% true. The full story is here, and if you want to skip to that, I’ll understand. But if you’re not convinced that it’s worth your time, let me tell you more.

Somewhere in Tampa Bay, a woman lived with her two sons in a decrepit rental house. She chain-smoked, ping-ponged from bad job to bad job, and never had enough money. Nothing out of the ordinary there; she was just another of the unwashed masses, unintelligent and bound for nowhere. Then, one of her neighbors saw a face in the window. A little girl’s face. Nobody knew there was a daughter in that house.

When the police came, they found a house so filthy the smell made them vomit:

“I’ve been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad,” Holste said later. “There’s just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting.”

And in the worst part of this horrible slum lived Dani. She was in a room so small it might have been a closet, surrounded by insects and a pile of her own dirty diapers. She had a blank stare, could not speak or even acknowledge the officer who found her. She was covered in lice and sores.

She was seven years old.

The police had been called before on this family, and had offered the mother help to care for her (apparently) troubled daughter. But she always declined, and they always left empty-handed. Until now. Realizing the immediate risk to Dani’s health and life, they removed her from the home. She never came back.

Her name, according to her mother, was Danielle. At the hospital they discovered that she weighed 46 pounds. And on top of all her other problems, she behaved like a feral child, unable to speak, unable to walk except shuffling from side to side. (Trapped in a closet for most of her life, she must have taught herself to walk in the narrow space between her mattress and the window). It was obvious that she couldn’t go back to the woman who’d birthed her (”mother” seems too charitable a term), but who would want to take on an untameable, pseudo-autistic seven-year-old?

I’m afraid you’ll have to follow this link to read the rest of Dani’s story - trust me, you want to. And if I may step into my pulpit for a moment, I’d just like to say one thing. All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing. If it weren’t for the neighbors, Dani would be dead now.

Back to your regularly scheduled blog.

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