A woman suffering from mental illness and her disabled son were discovered dead in a Bronx house of horrors on Friday, with her 4-year-old daughter apparently trapped inside with the bug-covered corpses for days, subsisting on chocolate, according to authorities and family members.
Lisa Cotton, 38, and her 8-year-old son, Nazir Millien, were pronounced dead at the tragic scene.
Promise, the woman’s 4-year-old daughter, was discovered covered in chocolate on her mother’s bed by an older sibling who had come to check on the doomed family.
Neither body showed signs of trauma.
Cotton, who had asthma, may have died of cardiac arrest, authorities told her father, Hubert Cotton, while Nazir, who was born prematurely and had a feeding tube, may have starved to death.
Promise was taken to a local hospital in stable condition, according to his family and police officers.
It’s unclear when the mother and son died or how long the girl was alone inside, but neighbors had been complaining about a foul odor that smelled like “death” for weeks.
Following an anonymous 911 call, cops conducted a welfare check on the family Tuesday at the East 231st Street apartment in the Wakefield section.
Nobody answered the door to the second-floor unit. According to sources, Cotton’s neighbors told officers they hadn’t seen her or her children in two weeks.
However, responding officers heard no noise or smelled anything, so there was no reason to break down the door, according to police sources.
“They said they’d be back in a few days,” a neighbor stated about the cops. “One of the social workers said she was trying to get a court order to have the door broken in.”
The shocking discovery was made Friday night, when Hubert, 71, received a call from his daughter’s landlord asking if she had moved out.
“I’d been calling her for days and she hadn’t answered. “I figured she didn’t respond because she didn’t want me to talk to her,” Hubert told The Post Saturday.
He sent Cotton’s eldest daughter to the apartment to check on them.
“When she came in, [Nazir] was slumped over,” he explained, still sitting in his chair.
The young woman then searched for Cotton, but instead discovered Promise “feeding herself with chocolate” on her mother’s bed, he claimed.
“She picked her up, ran outside, and called the cops,” the weeping father explained.
According to a transcript of the young woman’s Friday night 911 call, she noticed “bugs crawling on” Nazir’s body.
Nazir was “very small.” I held him in my palm. “Like a bird, like a young bird,” the distraught grandfather remembered.
He is currently caring for Promise in his Bronx home.
When The Post arrived on Saturday, the traumatized girl was curled up in a chair at her grandfather’s house, silently watching cartoons.
“She has not said anything. She is a baby. She occasionally looks at me, you know? “As if she knows something,” Hubert said about the child. “We don’t know anything, we’re trying to find out.”
Hubert, who is originally from St. Kitts, stated that his daughter struggled with what could be bipolar disorder.
He now wonders how he will lay her and his grandson to rest.
“I’m sorry…two of them,” he said through tears. “How will I get the money? “To bury both of them?”
The horrific deaths “feel fake,” according to Lisa Cotton’s brother, Raheem Smith.
“I don’t understand what happened,” said the man.
Neighbors were left with questions.
“The landlord hadn’t done wellness checks, so people and neighbors called,” said Eric Perez, who lives upstairs from Lisa Cotton. “It just smells like rat infested . . . the exterminator said the same thing — the smell is similar to rats and even death.”
According to police sources, the mother was facing a case with the Administration for Children’s Services.
She was arrested in June 2021 on child abandonment charges after being caught acting erratically, swinging her then-infant daughter around in a stroller and setting fire to a wig in front of a commercial strip on White Plains Road, according to sources.
When police arrived, they discovered her walking away from the child. Authorities said the case was later sealed.
Another neighbor, who did not want to be identified, stated that the mother experienced “episodes.”
“One time she threw paint out the window, and she has been talking about the devil,” the neighbor said, adding, “About a year ago, she was out here talking about the devil. I wasn’t sure what was going on.”
According to another resident, the mother appeared suicidal and had gone to the building’s rooftop with her son a few years ago with apparent deadly intent.
“She wanted to commit suicide with the boy,” the neighbor, Sharlene, explained.
Sharlene, a home health aide, recalled another incident in which the mother declared, “I am going to kill everyone on the block.”
“It hurts because it’s somebody who you know, somebody who you see, somebody who you were close to, and now it’s gonna be when you come outside, you see no one there and that’s gonna hurt,” she told me. “I hope the little girl is going to be okay.”
An ACS spokesperson stated that the situation is now being investigated.
Another resident, Mark, stated that ACS should have done more to help the children.
“We called police, and they took her away,” he said about the roof incident. “In a sense, I blame ACS. “They should have done more from the beginning.”
“Why leave the kids with her?” he continued. “When they arrived to check on her, they should not have left. “They should have been more forceful.”
