THEIR HOUSE WAS NOT A HEALTHY HOME

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Everything about the child is beautiful. She has beautiful hair, beautiful eyes (made even more beautiful by silver glitter she wears on the day we meet), a beautiful smile, and a beautiful soul.

You can see a child's soul when they're new. "Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here." So says the poem. But as they age? Souls often hide.

Mikaela Moore's soul doesn’t hide. It shines. She is 9 years old and going into fourth grade. She lives on a quiet street in Abington with her mother, Patrice, her father, Dean, her sisters Deanna, 14, and Alexa, 7, and her new umbrella cockatoo, Sassy. She likes to write and draw and go fishing with her Uncle Scott. And she wants to be a teacher or a doctor when she grows up. Mikaela, in many ways, is a typical kid.

But she isn’t typical. For the first six years of her life she was always sick, she had a heart infection that nearly killed her. Her sisters were sick, too. And her father. He got an infection in his vocal cords and couldn't talk for three months. Her mother had pneumonia more than 20 times in six years. And her brother Ryan died when he was just 6 months old.

Now Mikaela isn’t sick. Now the whole family is on the mend.

Except for Ryan, who passed on Valentine's Day 1996.

Dean and Patrice Moore weren’t always plagued with sickness. They grew up in Dorchester. They dated in their teens. They got married, lived in East Harwich. They had a healthy baby daughter.

And then moved to Abington, to a four-bedroom Cape.

Six months later, Ryan was born. "He was the best baby. Always smiling." His death was seen as a fluke. A tragedy. Bacterial meningitis.

Inexplicable.

After Ryan died, Dean and Patrice and daughter Deana suffered bouts of dizziness, and had rashes and kidney infections and lung problems. "We thought it was grief." Patrice says.

And then Mikaela was born, and she had rashes, too, and chronic strep throat. When she was 6 months old, doctors found a bacterial infection in her blood.

"It was a nightmare," said Patrice. Then Alexa was born, and her face kept swelling up. "We all had different problems, so no one saw the same medical people."

So no one put the pieces together: sick parents, sick kids, even the dogs were sick. The family's two cocker spaniels both developed lung and kidney disease.

The Moores had their water tested. But it wasn't the water. Dean's mother believed it was the house. So Dean went looking, and in the crawl space under the master bedroom, an addition built by the previous owner, he found "black mold spores everywhere."

And then he discovered what he believes is the source. "I'm out in the backyard, digging, and boom, I hit concrete." Just 12 inches from the bedroom against code and against logic there was a septic tank that had been left full when the property was linked to the town's sewer system in 1991.

Wearing protective gear, he cleaned up the mold and poured concrete over the dirt-bottom floor that separated the addition from the crawl space. And then he had the house tested. The experts said to get his family out, to tear the place down and leave everything. The house was toxic.

"The spores were like dust, and they were everywhere. Overnight, a high chair sprouted "stuff that looked like something out of a horror movie," he said.

Mikaela's scalp started to ooze. "The doctor thought it was goose poop from doing headstands in the park," her mother said. "But then they tested it. She had mold coming out of her head."

The contractor who built the addition 12 inches from a septic tank is immune to any legal action. It happened too long ago. The town inspectors? They're immune, too. No one is culpable. No one is legally guilty because, while the family believes the black mold caused them to get sick, there is no definitive proof.

But, morally?

The Moores tore down their house and carted it away. And decontaminated their lot. Friends helped them. The insurance company canceled their policy, so friends helped them build their new house, too, on the cleaned-up site.

They took a second mortgage and moved in three summers ago. The house is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. "They're healthy. That's all I care about," Patrice says.

But they still have asthma, and Patrice has polycystic kidney disease, and Mikaela has learning difficulties. And the dogs had to be put down.

"So you have three girls," people say when they meet the Moores. "Yes, three girls," they reply.

But they had a boy, too. Ryan, called Angel by his mother. "We didn't just lose our home," she says. "We lost our son."