Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Neighbors near the yellow clapboard house where a 3-year-old handicapped boy was found dead Tuesday didn’t really know the people who lived in the Richmond Avenue residence.

The two-story structure is divided into multiple residences, as demonstrated by the addresses at the front of the building. The tenants come and go.

A woman who did not give her name but lives in the vicinity of the 300 block of Richmond Avenue was aware something happened involving a neglected toddler.

It was something “horrible,” police said.

The scene Tuesday between the seawall and Procter Street was enough to shake up veteran officers, said Port Arthur Police Det. Mike Hebert.

“I think because of the type of call it was. Obviously you have a child in distress,” Hebert said. “Officers rush there. Paramedics rush there. Once they saw the child, they knew something horrible took place. It was a very somber day in this police department.”

Hebert said in such calls, a first responder’s first thought is to save the child. When they took in the scene, they knew “something was horribly wrong.”

Investigators found the child’s body to be in an “extremely emaciated condition,” Hebert said in a news release.

Police arrested the child’s mother, Tina Louis, 43, and the child’s sister, Kristen Louis, 21, on charges of injury to a child, a first-degree felony.

Bond is set at $750,000 for each woman.

Shari Pulliam with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said the department is working alongside PAPD.

Protective Services did not take custody of the deceased child’s siblings; they are with family, Pulliam said.

Please urge the public to report any suspected child abuse or neglect to the Texas Statewide Hotline at 800-252-5400.