A 35-year-old Midlothian man faces two counts of child endangerment after a witness spotted two children in the back seat of a pickup that had been enclosed with a wire cage to keep them from getting out of the truck.
Posen police Detective Sgt. Robert Quirk said his department was called to a gas station at 147th Street and Kedzie Avenue at 4 p.m. Monday after the witness noticed the children crying inside the cage in the truck.

The man, whose name Quirk would not release, was arrested and the two children, ages 2 and 5, were taken into protective custody.

The state Department of Children and Family Services did not return a phone call seeking information about the children.

The cage was not unlike the barriers that enclose the back seat of a taxi or a police car, though much more crude, made of metal wire and bolted to the floorboards and ceiling, with padlocks to keep them closed, Quirk said.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, and I don’t think anyone else has,” Quirk said.

He said police initially were alarmed by the report of children in a cage, though relieved it didn’t end up that the children were forced to live in the enclosure.

“But that doesn’t take from the fact they were caged in,” he said.