Cindy Wilson’s kids aren’t happy with their new toys. The old ones went out to the curb with most of the family’s belongings last spring after their mother decided they weren’t safe.
But whiny children are the least of Wilson’s worries.
Spasms of coughing and an occasional nosebleed still plague three of her children, she said, nearly four months after she moved the family out of her country dream home in far western Hamilton County once it was discovered that she was renting a former methamphetamine lab.
A son, born in July after the family left for Hamilton, now exhibits some of the same problems. The boy’s doctor at the health clinic, Wilson said, mentioned just weeks ago that the signs point to meth exposure from cross-contamination.
Wilson said she kept appliances and bedding from the contaminated house because she couldn’t afford to replace them.
“When is it going to end?” the 33-year-old mother cried.
Wilson feels guilty about moving her kids to a place where the fastest-growing drug problem in America left its mark at her doorstep on Lawrenceburg Road in Whitewater Township.
She’s angry that no one told her what she was getting into – a house so contaminated that meth residue was even found in the toaster.
Hamilton County health officials had the rental house tested for methamphetamine after Wilson, then seven months pregnant, complained in April that her children were sick.
The county’s involvement isn’t the norm.
More than 100 houses, apartments and hotel rooms have been busted as meth labs in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky since 2000, an Enquirer investigation reveals. They are bought and sold, leased and re-rented, and can change hands repeatedly without anyone knowing about their potentially poisonous past.
A Hamilton Township woman looking for a bargain home through a sheriff’s auction wound up in a former meth lab. Her basement is contaminated. A couple who bought their retirement home near Morrow were told meth was cooked in their barn. But police records show it was happening in their basement.
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