The flashlight beams cut through the dirty window just after midnight. Dee France was on the couch, half-watching TV, when she saw them sweep across the front of the rundown house on Monte Vista Street. She opened the door before they even knocked. Detroit police and CPS agents stood on the porch.
They told her it was a wellness check for three-year-old Chase Allen. “He’s not here,” she said. “He’s with a lady. A friend.
Miss Robinson. ”
There was no Miss Robinson. She made it up on the spot. The officers left, and Dee closed the door, but she knew they weren’t done.
Ten, maybe twenty minutes later, they were back. They had a supervisor with them now, and they weren’t leaving. “We need to check the house,” one of them said. “Make sure he isn’t here.
”
Dee stepped back and opened the door wider. “Okay,” she said. “I confess. ”
The officers blinked.
“You confess what? ”
“He’s in the basement,” she said. “In the refrigerator. ”
In the broken basement freezer, sealed inside a laundry bag, they found the decomposing body of the three-year-old boy.
Neighbors and relatives hadn’t seen Chase Allen in more than three months. At the station, Dee sat across from the detectives and gave her version of what happened. She’d woken up one morning at the end of March, made breakfast for the kids, and gone to get Chase. She gave him water.
She sat him up. He fell back down. “He wasn’t breathing,” she said. “Was he cold?
” the detective asked. “Yeah, he was. ”
She claimed Chase was blind and had medical issues. She said he’d stopped eating for almost three weeks before he died.
She said she bought protein powder from GNC and a little bit of everything, that she tried everything she could. When the detective asked why she never took him to a doctor, she lowered her voice. “I was scared they was going to take my other kids. ”
So she didn’t call anyone.
She didn’t call 911. She dialed it at one point, she said, but she never pressed the final button because she was too afraid of what would happen to her other five children. Instead, she found a laundry bag and zipped her son inside it. She carried him downstairs to the basement, opened the old refrigerator that had come with the house, and put him inside.
Then she closed the door and went back upstairs to her life. She told a different lie to the man who was the father of some of her children. When he asked where Chase was, she said the boy was with a woman. When her father told her to take Chase to the hospital, she didn’t listen.
For three months, she kept living above the freezer. “I went down there a couple weeks ago,” she said. “I got on my knees and prayed. ”
“So you were able to move him around?
” the detective asked. “You put him in the bag while you were upstairs? ”
“Yes. ”
“Then you carried him down into the basement?
”
“Yes. ”
“And you put him in the freezer. Was it working? ”
“It was working,” she said.
“I don’t know what happened. ”
She said she discovered the refrigerator wasn’t working last week. But she never told anyone. She never asked anyone for help with the body.
For months, she let the children live in squalor while the remains of their brother broke down in the basement below. The autopsy told a very different story. Chase Allen did not die of malnutrition and he did not die in his sleep. The medical examiner found evidence of blunt force head trauma.
That was what killed him. And Dezzie later admitted to something else: she kicked Chase in the chest because she was frustrated that he wouldn’t eat. Investigators began to piece together the bigger picture. Dee France was not a woman who had one bad moment.
She had been on the radar of Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services since 2017, when she was involved in at least seven investigations as a parent. She had been arrested for harming a nephew she was caring for and served two years of probation for it. Chase’s own grandmother, Tonya Haynes, said she and other relatives had called DHHS about the children on dozens of occasions. She first grew suspicious when her daughter told her Chase had burned his hand on a cup of noodles.
The family begged Dee to give the children to them if she couldn’t handle them. “She couldn’t deal with it,” one relative said. “And we all said, give him to us if you can’t deal with it. ”
Chase was blind.
He needed special attention. He was a sweet little boy, the family said. After Chase was gone, Dee started telling stories. She told Tonya that Chase had gone to live with his paternal grandfather’s girlfriend.
The grandfather was in jail at the time, but when he got out, he denied it. Then Dee changed the story. At one point, she told relatives Chase was in the hospital. Another time, she said she’d given him away.
About two weeks before the body was discovered, family members went to the house on Monte Vista Street to confront Dee. Then they called DHHS again. They got no help. A neighbor named Lynette Hardy said the family had nothing.
In the winter, she saw the children wearing summer shoes and some without shirts. She bought them clothing and food, gave them rides, and connected Dee with tutoring resources because the kids had trouble reading. “She was a loving mother,” Lynette said. “That’s what I believed.
”
Lynette said Dee told her that Chase was living with her aunt and uncle in Alabama. She only recently learned the truth now that police were pulling a tiny body out of the basement. Inside the interrogation room, the detective tried to pin down one more thing. “Who all was home when that happened?
” he asked. “Any of your baby daddies? A boyfriend? ”
Dee mentioned a man, a man who slept in his black Tahoe in the driveway.
She said he wasn’t the father of Chase, that he’d asked questions about the boy and she’d lied to him, told him Chase was with a lady. The detective leaned in. “I’m not accusing you of lying,” he said. “But if something happened and you’re trying to cover for somebody, you need to think about your other kids.
Tell me if he did something to that child. ”
“No,” Dee said. “I swear on my kids. I swear.
”
She kept insisting. She had called her father for advice when Chase stopped eating. Her father told her to take the boy to the hospital. She didn’t.
In April of 2025, Chase’s father, Jawan Allen, filed a federal lawsuit against thirteen employees of Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services. The lawsuit alleged gross negligence and deliberate indifference, claiming the agency repeatedly left Chase with Dee or returned him to her soon after, even after the family’s repeated warnings. “He spent his final days of torment and abuse in complete darkness,” the lawsuit read. Dee France eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
In July of 2024, she was sentenced to 35 to 60 years in prison. During her victim impact statement, her sister looked at her and said, “You were supposed to protect Chase. Instead, you hurt him to the point where he can’t come back. ”
She is now serving her sentence at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Her earliest release date is June 2077. If she lives long enough to be released, she will be sixty-six years old, having spent four decades of her life behind bars. At the house on Monte Vista Street, an ever-growing memorial of toys and stuffed animals gathered on the cracked cement steps, a small outpouring of grief for a little boy who was blind, disabled, and utterly invisible to the system that was supposed to protect him.
