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Mom of five again charged with abuse

Deputies know the woman's house well. In this case, they say, she left a boy bound and gagged in a closet overnight.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published July 14, 2006

NEW PORT RICHEY - A woman kept a 6-year-old boy overnight in a closet with his feet bound, his hands taped behind his back and a sock stuffed in his mouth, authorities said.

Kamie Renae Myers, 36, of 6721 Ranchwood Loop was arrested on a charge of child abuse Wednesday. While authorities did not disclose her relation to the victim, others who live in her middle-class New Port Richey neighborhood said she is a single mother of five.

The arrest came barely a month after Pinellas County sheriff's deputies accused her of binding a misbehaving 5-year-old boy's hands and feet with masking tape and gagging him with a sock at an undisclosed location in Palm Harbor.

It is unclear whether the victim is the same in both cases. And in the Pasco case, Myers may not have bound the boy herself, according to reports.

The victim "stated that the defendant told another person to do it and it was done," a sheriff's investigator wrote, without further elaboration.

Since 1994, deputies have written 25 incident reports involving some combination of Myers and the Ranchwood Loop address, Pasco sheriff's spokesman Kevin Doll said. Eighteen of them cannot be released because of state privacy laws, he said. Those reports involved runaways, misdemeanor juvenile offenses and unfounded child-abuse investigations.

The seven reports obtained by the Times paint a picture of a woman struggling to control her children. Most of the incidents occurred after her divorce in 1999.

In June of that year, her 2-year-old son found her 19-month-old daughter floating in the deep end of their swimming pool. The girl's face was blue when Myers called 911, but she began breathing again minutes later.

"She's my little angel," Myers said then.

In February 2000, Myers reported her 3-year-old son missing. He was found five minutes later. She said he was an escape artist.

"The home appeared to be neat and orderly," a deputy wrote at the time, "and the children appeared to be well taken care of."

In November 2000, Myers called sheriff's deputies and asked them to arrest her 9-year-old son for arson after she found him playing with matches in the bathroom. Deputies found no evidence of a crime.

In February 2005, her 13-year-old son was put into protective custody after he barricaded himself in his bedroom and tried to drink a bottle of fabric softener.

Last April, Myers called 911 to report the same son had taken a DVD from her bedroom. She said she did it because he needed to learn he had to respect authority. Deputies spoke to the boy and left without further action.

Myers was free Thursday on $20,000 bail in the Pinellas case and $5,000 bail in the Pasco case. Her children have been removed from her custody.

At the house on Ranchwood Loop, the only sign of life was a column of red ants crawling up the stucco.

News of the charges shocked Hubert Busse, an 88-year-old neighbor two doors down.

"Jesus," he said. "I thought it was a nice family."

Times researcher Carolyn Edds and Times staff writer Jamal Thalji contributed to this report. Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or 727 869-6245.

[Last modified July 13, 2006, 22:42:50]