Two women have been arrested in Barrow County in connection with a wide-ranging case involving the abandonment and neglect of four disabled adults, including one from Gwinnett County, according to police.
On Thursday, the Barrow County Sheriff's Office took Priscilla Streete and her sister Narquitta Streete into custody after searching their Bethlehem homes. Both were charged with giving false statements to law enforcement and being a party to the crime of neglect and exploitation of disabled adults.
Authorities said the sisters helped Marlo Kenneth Yarbrough operate two homes that care for disabled adults. He was arrested Saturday and charged with abandoning the four disabled adults in a vacant house in Winder last weekend, according to police and arrest warrants.
Yarbrough, 41, is being held at the Barrow County Detention Center on four counts of reckless conduct and four counts of exploitation and neglect of disabled adults, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told the AJC. On Friday, Yarbrough was also charged with giving false statements to law enforcement.
Smith said police discovered the four mentally ill adults alone, without their medication, in an unheated house in Winder after receiving a call from a parent of one of the adults.
Smith said Yarbrough receives from $600 to $1000 a month to care for the four people, two men and two women, and had housed them in two homes in Winder.
When code enforcement officers threatened to close the "unlicensed" care homes Yarbrough took the tenants -- ages 32, 19, 57 and 26 -- to the vacant home and left them with a bag of fast food and a cell phone, Smith said.
He said investigators are looking into whether Yarbrough properly handled the finances and medications of his four disabled tenants.Two of the tenants were sent back to a personal care home in Gwinnett County, Smith said.The other two were turned over to family members, he said.
Investigators from the GBI, Winder and Barrow County are trying to track down other unlicensed personal care homes that might be connected to the two Bethlehem homes, according to Smith. Yarbrough's homes may be a part of a Lawrenceville-based network called Transition House, Smith said.
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