‘This kid’s going to die’: Neighbors say 9-year-old abandoned in tent off Aurora. CPS claims he’s not in danger.

This is not a story about homelessness. This is a story about fentanyl and what it does to children who get trapped in its orbit.

A few blocks off Aurora Avenue in North Seattle, neighbors said a 9-year-old boy lives in a tent with his parents. They said his mother is a fentanyl addict who works as a prostitute on Aurora, bringing johns back to the tent. They said the father has a long criminal history and insists everything is fine.

According to neighbors, the boy is not enrolled in any school and has never been enrolled in any school in Washington. His clothes are filthy. His fingernails are caked with dirt. Neighbors said he has had bruises on his body and a hacking chest cold with green mucus in his nostrils. He is left alone in the tent for hours during the day, and sometimes all night when his mother disappears on benders that can last a week at a time. When she is present, neighbors believe she uses the drug in front of her child.

Neighbors have called the Seattle Police Department (SPD). They have called Child Protective Services (CPS). Outreach workers have shown up at the tent offering immediate shelter for the mother and son: a private bedroom, a private bathroom, available that same day. The parents said no.

And apparently, in the state of Washington, there is not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

Kristine Moreland has been doing outreach work in Seattle for nearly 25 years. She arrived at the tent that morning with her team from The More We Love. I joined them to see what happens when help is offered and what happens when it is refused.

Moreland did not mince words.

“To anybody in their right mind, leaving a 9-year-old boy in a tent in Seattle off of Aurora is frightening,” Moreland said.

Neighbor shaken by what she saw: ‘We are facing addiction like never seen before’

Jenna Ducato is a neighbor. She met the boy about six weeks ago and was shaken by what she saw.

“His clothes are dirty. He has dirt under his fingernails. He had an audibly distressing chest cold. He had dark green mucus in his nostrils, evident that he hasn’t probably had a bath or a shower in quite some time,” Ducato said. “And his clothes were tattered.”

Ducato brought him fresh clothes. But she knows that is not a solution.

“That is not sustainable,” she said. “We really have to get deeper here to help this young boy.”

Ducato sees this situation as a symptom of something larger.

“This city has politicized this homelessness issue. And it’s not a homelessness issue,” she said. “We are facing addiction like never seen before. And this is an acute and perfect example of a scenario where a 9-year-old boy is suffering the consequences as a result of two parents who have addiction problems and are refusing help.”

Mother makes her son wait nearby in the bushes

Andrew Steelsmith lives nearby. He has a five-year-old and a two-year-old of his own. The tent sits in the only green space within walking distance for families in this neighborhood, a place where kids used to play. He has watched the situation deteriorate for four months.

“She’s a fentanyl addict. She’s open about it,” Steelsmith said. “There have been kind of a rotating door of men that have been coming in and out.”

When Steelsmith asked one of the men what he was doing, the man said he was “giving her bandages.” But Steelsmith could hear what was actually happening inside the tent.

“It was obvious what they were doing. You could hear it,” he said.

While out on a walk one night, Steelsmith heard the sounds coming from the tent. Then he saw the boy standing in the bushes nearby, waiting.

“She makes him wait in the bushes outside of it,” Steelsmith said.

The boy waits there, neighbors said, while his mother is with johns inside. Standing in the dark. Alone. Listening.

Steelsmith has seen the conditions inside the tent.

“He’s filthy. His fingernails are long and torn up. He looks gaunt,” Steelsmith said. “He’s sitting here in a tent in freaking mold and dirt.”

Steelsmith said contacts in both the Seattle and Shoreline school districts tell him the boy has never been enrolled in any school in Washington. The parents claim he is in a “slow start” homeschool program. That program does not exist.

“But they’ll lie about it,” Steelsmith said.

And when the mother disappears, the father is often gone too.

“There have been several times when we would discover that he was here all night alone. The 9-year-old boy,” Steelsmith said. “The mother would disappear for a week at a time. She’d go on kind of benders.”

A child alone in a public park

This is a public park. Not a hidden encampment under a freeway overpass. Not a tent city in a fenced-off industrial lot. A park. The kind with grass and benches. The kind where families walk their dogs on weekday mornings. The kind where parents push strollers. The kind where children ride bikes, chase each other, and do the things children are supposed to do.

And in the middle of it, neighbors said, a 9-year-old boy sits alone in a tent.

Sometimes for hours while his father is at work. Sometimes all night while his mother is on Aurora. Sometimes, for days at a time, when she disappears on a bender, and nobody comes back.

No supervision. No school. Nothing to do but sit and wait.

Anyone can walk through this park. Anyone can see the tent. Anyone can watch the patterns. Can see when the parents leave. Can see when the boy is alone. Can see that nobody is protecting him.

Neighbors have watched strangers approach. They have watched men come and go at all hours. They have watched a child learn to sit quietly in the bushes while his mother does what she does to pay for her next hit.

This is not a hidden crisis. It is happening in plain sight, in a public park, in a residential neighborhood, in a city that says it cares about children.

That is why we are not telling you where this tent is. That is why we are not showing it to you. That is why we are not publishing the boy’s name or his photograph. Because the systems that are supposed to protect him have failed. Because the laws that are supposed to intervene cannot. Because the parents who are supposed to keep him safe will not.

Right now, the only thing standing between this boy and a predator is luck.

And luck is not a policy. Luck is not a plan. Luck is what we rely on when everything else has collapsed.

Father turns down safe, private room

Moreland did not come with a brochure or a phone number. She came with a room. Available that day.

“Today, I could immediately bring the woman and the child into a safe private room, private bathroom environment,” Moreland said. “And then I can begin to work on the traumas and the chains that are holding this woman in this space. But we would offer shelter, food, and a pathway out of homelessness and addiction today. Today. Right now, I have a room available.”

I watched as she offered it to the mother and son. The father’s response of “no” was immediate.

“Because there’s a child in a tent, sir. And we want to make sure he gets somewhere safe,” Moreland told him.

“Is there a reason why you’re turning down safe housing for your family?” she asked.

“I’m turning it down from you,” the father replied.

“You don’t want safe housing?” she asked.

“Not from you,” he responded.

“Can you tell me why, sir?” she asked.

“I do not like you. And I am not going to rent,” he said.

Moreland pressed him. “Where else would you like me to provide you safe housing?”

“I already have it taken care of,” the father said.

“That’s great news. When will you be moving in?” she asked.

Silence.

There is no other housing. There never was.

“He deserves it,” Moreland told the family, speaking about the boy. “That’s the biggest piece. You guys deserve it together. You deserve it.”

The father told her to leave.

“And if this family is hurting, truly hurting, and needs love and support and resources and housing and food, it’s offered. It’s here,” Moreland said later. “Every ounce of their needs will be met, and they need to take that opportunity because their child deserves it.”

Neighbor offers to drive child to school

Steelsmith tried a different approach. He offered to drive the boy to school.

“Does he need a ride to school in the morning? Because I take my kids to Shoreline every morning. I offered last time, but I want to offer again. Let’s get the kid to school in the morning, man,” Steelsmith said.

The father’s increasingly agitated response: “He isn’t going to that school anyway.”

He is not going to any school. And the father just admitted it.

What happened next was difficult to watch. The confrontation escalated quickly. The mother started cursing angrily. Steelsmith pushed back on the boy’s condition.

“You’re not being a mother to him, and you’re not being a father to him because he’s sitting here in a tent in freaking mold and dirt. You won’t even let us give him a shower.”

“He showers every day, dude! Shut the f*** up, Andrew,” the mother shouted.

“Bulls***. Why is he so dirty? Why is he so dirty?”

“You’re such a liar. He’s not dirty.”

Before leaving, Steelsmith made sure the boy could hear him.

“Hey, you know where to go if you need safety, OK? If you need to be safe. If you feel like you’re unsafe …”

A neighbor, a stranger really, had to tell a 9-year-old where to run if things get bad. Because no one else is coming for him.

Outreach worker’s hands are tied: ‘It breaks my heart’

Moreland walked away distraught.

“I’ve been doing this work for 25 years, and every time I have to walk away and leave a child in a tent, it breaks my heart,” she said. “It’s not the way that we should be responding.”

She described what neighbors have witnessed.

“This mother has been trafficking and trafficked down on Aurora and leaving him at night. And my understanding is that they bring men back to the tent where he is supposed to be safe. Bringing strangers back to perform unthinkable acts while intoxicated on unthinkable drugs is the most unsafe environment I could ever think of for a child,” Moreland said.

And yet she cannot act.

“I can’t just pull him out of the tent. And respectfully, at this moment, that’s really what should happen. He needs to be out of a drug environment,” she said.

Moreland said what makes this case so agonizing is how many people have tried to intervene.

“It’s not just CPS, it’s the City of Seattle’s outreach workers, it’s The More We Love outreach workers, it’s CPS, it’s law enforcement, it’s neighbors that are concerned,” she said. “This is an entire community reaching out and saying this boy needs help, and yet nobody can move him.”

She paused.

“There’s a broken system of lack of accountability,” Moreland said. “And the only person that’s going to be harmed in this is this child.”

But she also wanted to make something clear: everyone in that tent is suffering.

“If you unzip that tent, there are three gravely hurting people in there,” Moreland said. “There’s a father in there who thinks this is the best place to put his son. It’s not. There’s a mother who’s being exploited. That is not OK.”

CPS determines boy has ‘appropriate food and bedding’

Seattle Police have responded to the location multiple times. We obtained the incident report from October, when officers arrived for a welfare check and found the boy alone. The father was not there. He had to be called back from Jack in the Box.

The officer noted that the mother is “unreliable.” The father claimed the boy was being homeschooled on a “slow start.” The officer wrote that he “was not informed of which school.” He apparently did not verify it. He did not check. He just wrote it down.

Based on that conversation, SPD determined the child was not in imminent danger.

Steelsmith sent us screenshots from a later email exchange with SPD. At some point, SPD and CPS visited the tent together. An officer emailed Steelsmith with the result: “CPS examined [boy’s name redacted] and observed appropriate food and bedding in the tent.”

Appropriate. Food and bedding. In a moldy tent where neighbors said a fentanyl-addicted mother makes her son wait in the bushes while she turns tricks. That is “appropriate.”

The mother was not present during the visit. Again. The father told them he would be moving into a motel “within a couple of days.” The officer’s response: “Let’s hope that is the case!”

In a follow-up email to Steelsmith, the officer made clear this was not SPD’s call: “The state is the ultimate authority of whether a child is taken into custody. Even when police take a child into protective custody, we have to turn the child directly over to CPS.”

It is clear from the exchange that the responding officers are frustrated, too. They can see what is happening. They can document it. But under Washington law, CPS makes the call on whether a child is removed. And CPS has decided this boy can stay.

Ducato has watched the cycle repeat.

“They can only take these things so far and raise the awareness to CPS, and then everything seems to stall,” she said.

Moreland was blunt about the bureaucratic delays. While at the park, she called CPS and was placed on hold for a long time before finally hanging up in frustration.

“Where is everybody? Where are you, CPS?” she said. “There’s no queue when we’re talking about a 9-year-old boy sleeping in a tent with addicted parents while the mother is being trafficked on Aurora. There’s no queue. I’m not standing in line. He shouldn’t either.”

“This kid is in danger right now. This is an emergency,” Steelsmith told us.

What CPS told KIRO Newsradio

We emailed CPS with questions. We asked directly: What is the threshold for removing a child when a kid is not in school, is not bathing, is living with fentanyl and prostitution? What would have to change?

Nancy Gutierrez, Director of External Communications for the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, cited privacy laws that prevented the agency from confirming or commenting on this specific case. But she was able to speak in general terms.

“By its legal definition, poverty, substance use, homelessness and/or exposure to domestic violence perpetrated against someone other than the child do not constitute neglect or maltreatment in and of themselves,” Gutierrez wrote.

It appears drug use in front of a kid does not count. Homelessness does not count. Not going to school does not count. A child exposed to his mother’s prostitution does not count. None of it counts. Not by itself.

CPS said its “Structured Decision Making tool” determines whether there are active safety threats. Their legal standard requires “imminent risk of physical harm” with “a causal relationship between conditions in the home and the threat of harm.”

In plain English: unless the boy is physically hurt, they cannot prove that living in the tent in these conditions will hurt him. They have to wait for the damage.

“Somehow CPS is OK with this,” Steelsmith said.

The Keeping Families Together Act

This may not even be CPS’s fault.

In 2023, Washington lawmakers passed the Keeping Families Together Act with overwhelming bipartisan support. The law was a response to decades of criticism that the child welfare system removed children from their families too quickly and too often, particularly in communities of color.

Studies have shown that Black and Native American children in Washington were removed from their homes at significantly higher rates than white children, even when circumstances were similar. Critics argued poverty was too often mistaken for neglect and the trauma of separating children from their parents sometimes caused more harm than the situations they were removed from. Foster care, they noted, was not always safer. Kids bounced between placements. Siblings were split up. Some were abused in the very system meant to protect them.

The Keeping Families Together Act was designed to fix that. It raised the legal standard for removing a child, requiring proof that removal is “necessary to prevent imminent physical harm” and that there is “a causal relationship between conditions in the home and the threat of harm.” The intent was to keep families intact whenever possible and to push caseworkers toward services rather than separation.

Supporters said it would reduce trauma, keep more families together, and address racial disparities in the system. Former Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed it into law.

But critics said the pendulum has swung too far. The law’s strict requirements mean caseworkers can document neglect, witness dangerous conditions, and still be powerless to act. The standard requires not just risk but imminent physical harm. Not future harm. Not likely harm. Imminent.

For the neighbors watching a 9-year-old boy live in a fentanyl tent off Aurora, the question is simple: What qualifies as imminent if this does not?

The boy is not in school. He is not bathing. He is left alone for days at a time. His mother brings strangers into the tent for sex while he waits in the bushes. And yet the law says this is not enough to remove him, because he has not been physically harmed. Yet.

CPS told us they offer “alternate responses” like connecting families to services. But this family has been offered services. Multiple times. They said no. So what happens when a family refuses help, and the law will not let you intervene?

Apparently, you write “appropriate food and bedding” in your report and walk away.

Dwayne, an outreach worker with The More We Love, was not surprised when he heard CPS and SPD had visited and left the boy in the tent.

“I’ve seen it time and time again,” he said. “I worked downtown in some of the worst parts, and seen people smoking fentanyl right in front of her with their kids in the stroller. Police are called, and they don’t do nothing.”

He paused.

“They’ll suspend your license. How come they can’t suspend your child?” he questioned.

Ducato said she is losing faith in the system.

“I don’t have a lot of hope right now,” she said.

Moreland said this case reflects something larger.

“What we need to know is that what we are doing to end homelessness isn’t working,” she said. “We have to change.”

What comes next

In January, Seattle’s political landscape shifts dramatically.

Mayor-elect Katie Wilson, a progressive democratic socialist and community organizer, narrowly defeated incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell in November. She campaigned heavily on criticizing Harrell’s approach to homelessness, describing his administration’s frequent encampment removals as ineffective “cosmetic fixes” that simply displace people without addressing root causes.

Wilson has pledged to end encampment sweeps upon taking office. Instead, she favors a “Housing First” model that would rapidly move people into non-congregate shelter with intensive case management and services. She aims to create 4,000 new emergency housing units during her term, prioritizing outreach, addiction treatment, mental health services, and permanent supportive housing. Funds currently allocated for the Unified Care Team, which coordinates sweeps, could be redirected toward shelter expansion and services.

Supporters argue sweeps are cruel and ineffective, as encampments often reform nearby without solving underlying issues like affordability and behavioral health. Critics worry the approach could lead to larger, more visible encampments and increased public safety concerns for neighborhoods and businesses.

But the “Housing First” model assumes people will accept housing when it is offered. This family has not. They have been offered shelter multiple times. They have been offered services. They have seen the mother and child offered a private room with a private bathroom, available the same day. They said no. Every time.

What happens when the policy is “offer services” and the family refuses? What happens when the child cannot refuse on his own behalf?

Meanwhile, incoming City Attorney Erika Evans, a former federal prosecutor who defeated incumbent Ann Davison, has explicitly stated she will not enforce SOAP zones along Aurora Avenue. The Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution orders were enacted by the City Council in 2024, allowing judges to ban individuals convicted of or charged with prostitution-related offenses from the Aurora corridor. The intent was to target buyers and traffickers, disrupting the open-air prostitution market linked to violence and exploitation.

Evans has called SOAP zones ineffective and racially biased, arguing they criminalize survival behaviors without addressing addiction, trafficking, or housing needs. Her office plans to shift focus toward diversion programs, services for sex workers, and partnerships targeting high-level traffickers and fentanyl dealers rather than street-level activity. Advocates say this de-emphasizes punitive approaches that disproportionately affect marginalized groups.

Critics say prostitution and related activity along Aurora will become more visible and persistent. For the neighbors on this block, watching a mother leave her son in a tent while she works Aurora, the policy feels personal.

But these will be the policies.

Ducato is worried about what lies ahead.

“No administration is perfect, but I definitely think that Mayor Harrell was making a strong effort. There were instruments in place that were starting to steer us in a better direction,” she said. “And from what I’ve heard so far, there isn’t much effort and devotion, and budget dollars being spoken to about being allocated for these problems. And it’s worrisome.”

For the neighbors watching a little boy’s childhood disappear inside a moldy tent, January is not a fresh start. It is a countdown.

Still in the tent

As of publication, neighbors said the boy is still in the tent. The mother is still on Aurora. The father is still promising he will move into a motel any day now.

A 9-year-old is still waiting in the bushes while fentanyl makes every decision for his family.

CPS says he is not in imminent danger.

Steelsmith is not asking for sympathy. He is asking a question.

“So the question is: Are you, as the people of Seattle, OK with stomaching this as a byproduct of the policies that the city and the incoming mayor wants? Are you guys OK with letting a 9-year-old kid sit in his squalor out here with no intervention? Is this, are you OK with it?” he asked.

He paused.

“Because you’re gonna have to be OK with it if you want to allow this to happen and flourish here. Because it’s going to get worse,” Steelsmith remarked.

He looked toward the tent.

“And this kid’s going to die,” he said.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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