‘Wake up!’: Parents allegedly passed out drunk on beach vacation while their kids wandered away
A Georgia couple allegedly passed out drunk on a Florida beach while their 5- and 7-year-old children wandered off — in a case that has shocked even the local sheriff.
Volusia County deputies desperately tried eight times to wake Alyssia Langley and her fiance, Timothy Stephens, both 27, as they lay in the sand on Daytona Beach on Saturday afternoon, according to an affidavit obtained by Fox 35 Orlando.
One of the deputies could be seen in body camera footage nudging Stephens as his arm was wrapped around his girlfriend.
“Hey. The sheriff’s office! Wake up!” she yelled in the footage obtained by Fox 35.
After police were able to rouse the couple, they seemed confused.
A deputy could be heard asking the couple where their children were, to which Stephens just gestured toward the ocean as he stumbled in the sand.
“You don’t know where they are?” the deputy asks.
Fortunately, the children were found safe — but unsupervised — splashing in their hotel pool nearby.
Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said he had trouble believing the parents could be so negligent when he read the arrest report.
“I went and read the report and I’m like, ‘You got to be kidding me,’” he told Fox 35.
“It just boggles my mind that you would drive here and get obliterated and allow a 5- and a 7-year-old to wander off.”
Both Langley and Stephens are facing felony neglect charges, and Stephens is also facing charges for trying to escape and for possessing alcoholic beverages on the beach, according to Fox News.
He was seen in body camera footage getting free from the deputies and running away, before he quickly face-planted in the sand and knocked himself out.
An arrest affidavit also notes that an open beer can was found near Stephens’ hands, along with multiple empty beer cans and an empty bottle of whisky in a cooler nearby, “and other various, unsealed alcoholic beverages in the immediate vicinity,” Fox reports.
He is not the children’s biological father but has “assumed a guardian role,” according to Fox.
“When we wonder what we see, why kids are the way they are, you gotta take a step back and look at who’s in charge,” Chitwood told Fox 35.
“And clearly these two clowns shouldn’t be in charge of — they can’t be in charge of themselves, let alone a 5-year-old or a 7-year-old.”
