Daytona PD: Mom Left 4-Year-Old Alone In Apartment

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Daytona Beach, FL - A 22-year-old Daytona Beach woman bonds out of Volusia County Jail after police say she left her 4-year-old daughter alone in her Beach Street apartment for around 45 minutes while she went to work.

Alexia Livingston's arrest yesterday afternoon (August 8th) came after a 26-year-old woman visiting friends at the Tzadik Bay Apartments found the little girl wandering outside by herself, according to the Daytona Beach Police Department arrest report.

First responders arrived at the apartment complex just south of Bethune Point Park around 3:30 p.m., finding the little girl with the woman who found her. That woman told DBPD she spotted the child on a second floor walkway around 30 minutes earlier crying for her mother and called police after she couldn't locate the mother, since identified in the arrest report as Livingston.

An officer managed to find the apartment the little girl lived in after testing unlocked doors and found no one else inside at the time, per the report.

30 minutes after the initial call for help, a man wearing a fast-food worker's uniform showed up and told DBPD that he just got off of work and came home to watch the girl. He also told officers that Livingston was supposed to be at work by 3 p.m. that day but he didn't get off work until an hour after that, according to the report.

That man's relationship to the girl wasn't explained in the report, but neighbors did tell DBPD he lived in the apartment where the girl was left alone.

DBPD also found a text on that man's phone from Livingston asking him to "Hurry n get home to [redacted] while she screamn n [expletive]", per the report. (The misspellings came directly from the report.)

When questioned later on by officers, Livingston told them she left her other child at a nearby daycare but couldn't do the same with the girl because there was no room for her at that daycare, according to DBPD.

The Florida Department of Children & Families responded and turned both children over to their grandmother, who already had legal custody of the 4-year-old but had allowed Livingston to care for her on a somewhat regular basis.

Livingston posted $500 bond on a misdemeanor child neglect charge, according to court records.

VCJ records show she's been booked there at least four times since September 2014, including last February on charges of petit theft from a merchant and tampering with physical evidence.