The four young siblings of Brittney Sierra, the mother of a Hallandale Beach baby whose remains may have been found behind their former rental home last week, have been taken into custody by the Department of Children & Families.
The children, 8-year-old twins, a 10-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, are the children of Renee Menendez, Sierra’s mother.
Sierra’s other two children had already been taken into DCF custody.
DCF picked up the children late Friday due to a “prior history” with the family, said spokeswoman Paige Patterson-Hughes. The were put into a state shelter over the weekend.
On Monday, a Broward County judge ordered there be no contact between the children and their parents.
Meanwhile, Sierra, 21, and Calvin Melvin, 27, are being held in Broward County jails on child neglect charges. The each are being held on $100,000 bond. Sierra is being represented by public defender Don Williams.
Tiny skeletal remains were unearthed behind the home at 106 NW First Ave., in Hallandale Beach Friday and Saturday. They are presumed to be those of 5-month-old Dontrell Melvin, who has not been seen in 18 months.
“The medical examiner will be examining the remains found on Friday and Saturday,” said Hallandale Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy. “DNA testing will be conducted for a positive ID. Until then, this is still an investigation of a missing persons case and a homicide case.”
He said that how soon the information becomes available depends on “the scientists and the protocols they use.”
Melvin and Sierra and two of Sierra’s children moved into another Hallandale Beach home just five blocks west of where they had been living when Dontrell disappeared about a year ago. They moved in with Sierra’s mother and her own four children.
The search for Dontrell began last week when authorities responded to a Department of Children & Families hotline call of alleged child neglect. When police arrived at the home, they found only two of Sierra’s children where there when there were supposed to be three.
Melvin had an explanation: He had taken Dontrell to live with his parents — the boy’s grandparents — because he and Sierra were experiencing financial difficulties. Officers went to the grandparents’ Pompano Beach home to check out the story, but the grandparents said it wasn’t true.
Police went back to talk to Melvin, but he was gone. He later turned himself in.
Melvin later offered police a variety of stories about his son’s disappearance. One was that he had left the boy at a North Miami-Dade fire station — which is legal under the state’s Safe Haven law, though only for about a week after a child’s birth.
Police didn’t believe him.
Sierra initially told police that Melvin walked out of their Hallandale Beach home with Dontrell in July 2011 — and came back without him. When she pressed Melvin about what he had done with the boy, he said he had given the child to his parents. She said she believed him, and life went on in the Hallandale Beach house, minus Dontrell.
Melvin and Sierra would have another child. There was also a third child — one by a different father — in the household.
Throughout the coming months, no one — not Sierra, not Melvin, not the boy’s grandparents nor other family members — reported to authorities that Dontrell had vanished.
