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A Plymouth woman faces charges after allegedly endangering her daughter by pointing a gun at her and violently wielding a knife in the child’s immediate vicinity.
Candise Chulada, 34, was charged on two counts of endangering welfare of children, one count of recklessly endangering another person and one count of simple assault.
According to the criminal complaint:
On Nov. 22, 2023, Plymouth Borough Detective Jeffrey Lewis was alerted to an alleged case of child abuse. The child’s current guardian, John Founds, arrived at the Plymouth Borough Police Department station and produced an electronic tablet brought to his home by the child.
Founds told Detective Lewis that the child had come to live with him and his girlfriend, the child’s aunt, Jill Brown, as a result of alleged use of narcotics by the child’s mother, Candise Chulada. The change in temporary custody was overseen by Luzerne County Child and Youth Services.
Jill Brown took the tablet to review its content. Allegedly, the tablet’s contents included multiple “disturbing” videos.
In one of the videos, Chulada allegedly says: “If there is anyone in the couch, come out now ‘cause I’m about to stab a [expletive],” before stabbing the living room couch her daughter was laying on with a large knife. Earlier in the video, Chulada allegedly pointed a rifle at, and in the vicinity of, her daughter.
In a second video, Chulada allegedly was seen carrying a black handgun around her living room, walking into another room of the house with her daughter, and later emerging back into the living room without her daughter or the gun.
In January, Founds, the child, and Detective Lewis went to the Children’s Advocacy Center in Wilkes-Barre, where the child told a forensic interviewer that she felt unsafe “with mommy and daddy,” presumably in reference to Chulada and the child’s father, Owen Brown Sr., who is also the boyfriend of Chulada. The child also allegedly told the interviewer that she had seen her “daddy” with a gun, and that “mommy and daddy” would hear weird noises coming from their basement.
Brown’s name was known to the Plymouth Borough Police before this instance, stemming from “multiple interactions on calls for service.”