Mother, Daughter Rob House, Bring 2-Year-Old Along

This woman is not mother of the year. It has a gynocentric theme worthy of a Ma Barker yarn, a fool’s errand equally as sad and crazy. The cops called it "bring your daughter to work day." Instead of an autumnal Saturday evening spent sipping heated milk, biting into Bartlett pears, reading Ten Little Labybugs aloud in front of a robust fire, here are a mother, daughter and granddaughter involved in a house robbery gone awry — well, the granddaughter had no say in it, she’s all of two years old and incapable of changing her sullied clothes or washing her dirty face or slipping shoes on her feet. This is modern family ghettoization, a crippler that recalls the sad line, “She’s only doing what her mother taught her ” from some song whose title and author escape me. The alleged heist according to the Muskegon Chronicle: Eagleson Township’s 26-year-old Nicole Bugajski, her daughter and 51-year-old mother Kimberly Mahnke parked in the driveway of an elderly couple’s home in Muskegon Township around 4:30 Saturday afternoon. Bugajski slipped in to rob the place while grandma and toddler waited in the car. Meanwhile, the old couple returned home in their pickup truck, parked it behind the car and got out.  The husband actually conversed with Mahnke -- he knows both women -- but made it inside to discover Bugajski in their bedroom. She sprinted away, hopped in the car, which Mahnke then maneuvered around the truck, but not before hitting it, and then a fence, on the way out. The cops soon had them. The two-year-old girl was wearing “a dirty pair of pants and shirt ... Her face was uncleaned and she had no shoes on.” Read on from this Heather Lynn Peters ' MC piece:

Upon searching the vehicle, officers found loose change, jewelry, clothes and gold coins belonging to the victim and several medical needles that Bugajski “admitted to owning.”

The officer said in the report that both women were “staggering” when he ordered them out of the car, and Bugajski had “numerous small bruises...on her arms” that he likened to “similar marks” he has seen on “heroin users.”

“Mahnke and Bugajski appeared to be under the influence of something,” the report said.

The toddler was found in the back seat with “a dirty pair of pants and shirt,” the report said. “Her face was uncleaned and she had no shoes on.”

The child has since been placed with family members, police said.

Court records indicate Bugajski’s criminal record includes operating a vehicle under the influence causing incapacitating injury in connection with a Aug. 11, 2003, collision on Hall Road just east of Carr Road.

Bugajski, then 18, was charged with driving drunk, crossing the center line and colliding head-on with a vehicle driven by a 56-year-old woman who was critically injured in the 8:10 a.m. crash.