The officers knocked on the door of the rundown house on Monte Vista Street just before one in the morning. The woman who answered looked startled, and she tried to wave them away like it was nothing. They were there for a wellness check on a three-year-old boy named Chase Allen. The woman said her name was Dee France, and she told them the boy was with a friend, a woman named Miss Robinson.
It didn’t take long for the officers to sense something was wrong. They left, called for a supervisor, and came back about twenty minutes later. This time, they asked to check the house. Dee opened the door wider, and her words came out flat, almost casual.
“Okay, I confess. He’s in the basement. In the refrigerator. ”
Inside, the officers found five children living in filth.
And in a broken freezer in the basement, sealed inside a laundry bag, was the decomposing body of a little boy. Chase Allen was three years old. He was blind. He had disabilities that made it hard for him to eat.
And he had not been seen by anyone in over three months. Dee was handcuffed and taken to the station. In the interview room, she tried to explain what happened. She said Chase had stopped eating for weeks.
She said she bought protein powder and tried to give him water, but he wouldn’t take anything. She said she was afraid to take him to a doctor because she feared social workers would take away her other children. She described the morning she found him. She made breakfast, went to check on him, and saw he wasn’t responding.
“I set him up, but he wasn’t breathing. I laid him on the hallway floor. ”
She told detectives she had dialed 911 but didn’t press send. Instead, she put her son in a laundry bag, carried him down to the basement, and placed him inside an old refrigerator that was still working at the time.
For months, she left him there. She went down once, a couple of weeks before the police came, and knelt to pray. That was all. When the detective asked if anyone had asked about the boy, Dee said her baby’s father had asked.
She told him Chase was with a lady. She told her own father that Chase wasn’t eating, and her father told her to take him to the hospital. She didn’t listen. She said she wanted to open up about it but was too scared.
“I was scared they was going to take my other kids,” she said. The detective pressed her about the man who had been staying there. Dee insisted he slept in his car in the driveway and hadn’t known the boy was in the basement. “No, I swear on my kids,” she said.
But the story didn’t hold up under the truth that came later. At autopsy, the medical examiner found that Chase died from blunt force head trauma. He was not simply a child who stopped eating. He was a child whose mother admitted she kicked him in the chest out of frustration because he wouldn’t eat.
The family had tried to sound the alarm. Chase’s grandmother, Tonya Haynes, said she and other relatives called Michigan’s child services dozens of times. She first grew suspicious when her daughter told her that Chase had burned his hand on a cup of noodles. Dee allegedly told family members that Chase had gone to live with his paternal grandfather’s girlfriend.
But the grandfather, who had been in jail at the time, said after his release that the child was never with him. The stories kept changing. At one point, Dee claimed Chase was in the hospital. Another time, she said she had given him away.
A relative begged her: “If you can’t deal with it, give him to us. ”
A neighbor, Lynette Hardy, said she saw the children in winter wearing summer clothes and shoes. Some had no shirts. She decided to help because the family clearly needed it.
She bought them clothes and food. She gave them rides. She thought Chase was living with relatives in Alabama. When she learned he had actually been missing, she was devastated.
On the cement steps of the shabby white home, an ever-growing pile of toys and stuffed animals appeared. Tonya Haynes set up a fundraiser to cover Chase’s funeral costs and to buy clothes for the surviving children. By the time of the recording, the fundraiser had reached ninety percent of its $10,000 goal. Chase’s father, Jawan Allen, later filed a federal lawsuit against thirteen employees of Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, accusing them of gross negligence and deliberate indifference.
The lawsuit claimed the defendants had multiple chances to intervene but repeatedly left Chase with or returned him to his abusive mother. It stated that he had spent his final days in “complete darkness. ”
In July of 2024, Dee France pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. She was sentenced to 35 to 60 years in prison.
During the sentencing, her sister delivered a victim impact statement that cut through everything. “You were supposed to protect Chase. Instead, you hurt him to the point where he can’t come back. ”
Dee is now serving her sentence at a women’s correctional facility in Michigan.
Her earliest possible release date is set for June 2077. If she ever walks out, she will have just celebrated her sixty-sixth birthday behind bars. Chase’s story is not unique. It echoes the case of Amir Griffin, whose emaciated body was brought to a hospital by his mother, and the case of Stoney and Steven Berry, two brothers hidden in a freezer after their mother killed them.
All of them were children. All of them deserved someone who would not look away.
