Couple Left Two Young Children Home with Frozen Dinners at Christmas. Then They Hopped on a Plane to Mexico

It was the kind of discovery that makes your stomach drop. In Chicago, a woman opened her front door to find two little girls from next door — nine-year-old Nicole Schoo and her 4-year-old sister, Diana — standing in the cold, trembling and scared. The sisters said their parents had gone to Mexico for Christmas and left them behind.

The neighbor, Connie Stadelmann, later said the girls told her their fire alarm was blaring and something in their house seemed to be leaking.

The date was Dec. 21, 1992. “Home Alone” had hit theaters two years earlier, but this was real life — and there was nothing funny about it.

Nicole and Diana were the daughters of David Schoo, a 45-year-old engineer, and his wife Sharon, 35, who stayed home with the children. The parents had left for an Acapulco vacation the day before, telling the girls to manage on their own in the family’s tri-level Tudor-style house — through Christmas.

There was no babysitter. No emergency number. No adult checking in. What the girls did have was a small stash of frozen dinners and cereal, plus a note laying out meal times and bedtime rules.

Nicole later told a TV reporter that the experience haunted her. “For a long time I would feel really bad,” she said, wondering what her parents were doing while she and her sister were alone.

And this wasn’t the first time. Nicole said they had been left without supervision before, including a four-day stretch the previous summer while their parents traveled to Massachusetts.

After the sisters arrived at the Stadelmann home, firefighters and sheriff’s investigators came to check for smoke. They didn’t find any — but they also didn’t find a single adult in the Schoo house. Alarmed, authorities began asking questions. Nicole and Diana were placed with their maternal grandmother and later moved into foster care as officials tried to track down their parents.

David and Sharon Schoo were finally located on Dec. 28 at an airport customs checkpoint in Houston as they flew back home.

They were charged with two felony counts of child abandonment and cruelty to children, along with a misdemeanor charge of child endangerment. The story exploded nationwide.

Reports soon painted a troubling picture of the couple. Neighbors and relatives described them as distant and socially withdrawn. David’s past also drew attention: he had earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Illinois in 1970, but surrendered his pharmacist’s license eight years later after admitting he stole roughly 1,900 high-potency Valium tablets from the Aurora drugstore where he worked. After that, he switched careers to engineering.

Sharon was described by her own family as highly isolated. Her father, speaking to reporters at the time, said she was so private that even close relatives had to “make an appointment” to see her.

Prosecutors indicted the Schoos on charges that included felony abandonment, neglect, endangerment, and cruelty to children. But they ultimately avoided trial through a misdemeanor plea deal and were sentenced to two years of probation.

The outrage didn’t end there. The case was so widely scrutinized that it helped reshape Illinois law. In 1993, the state revised the legal definition of child abandonment to cover intentionally leaving a child under 14 alone for 24 hours or more.

That same year, Nicole and Diana were reportedly placed for adoption.

Even as public attention faded, some neighbors remained furious — not just at what happened, but at the idea the girls might ever return to that home. One neighbor said the parents could travel anywhere they liked, as long as they never had the chance to hurt the children again.