The Big Children

Originally Aired: February 1, 1951 Dragnet #86, "The Big Children," Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Ben Romero from the Juvenile Bureau investigate a disturbing report from a neighbor in the wealthy Bel Air district. Miss Jeanette Bajan, a cook working in one of the area's colonial mansions, has called in a complaint about two children from next door—seven-year-old Richard Kessler and his five-year-old sister Judy—who have been going door to door begging for food for the past several days. Despite living in a neighborhood of $50,000 homes, the children appear half-starved. When Friday and Romero visit the Kessler home, they find eight-year-old Richard alone, warming borrowed soup in a kitchen littered with empty whiskey bottles. The once-beautiful house is cold, dusty, and strewn with children's toys and scraps of stale bread. Richard, polite and well-mannered despite his dirty shirt, tries to maintain that everything is fine, but Friday gently presses him about his mother's whereabouts. The boy finally admits she left last Friday night and hasn't returned, leaving the children to fend for themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances.