Texas teens find four abandoned children under 4 years old. Police said they had been alone for up to 2 days.

A group of teenagers is being praised for their actions after they found four young children abandoned in a suburb of Houston, Texas.

Police in the city of Spring said they were alerted about the children on Thursday at about 11 p.m.

The teenagers said they saw three very young children roaming outside of a home. When they investigated, they found another baby inside the home.

They called their parents who alerted the police.

Two of the teenagers described to KRIV-TV what they saw when they encountered the children.

"Running up to us, screaming with excitement, like 'Oh my gosh, people,'" said Lizette Lingle. "One just rips off the diaper and comes running in the street naked."

"We knocked on their front door. Nobody answered," said Jonathan Ubeda. "We looked through their front window. Everything's a mess."

They were about to leave when they heard a sound.

"When we left out the house, my girlfriend heard like a thump, like BOOM, then a baby started crying, and when she goes back there to look, it's a whole little one-year-old baby," Ubeda continued.

Police said it was unclear how long the children were alone, but that it could have been for up to two days.

The oldest of the children, who was four years old, told police that they believed their mother was dead.

But she was not dead, and police found her at a motel miles away from the home.

Police charged 27-year-old Angela Huff, the mother of the children, with four counts of child abandonment.

On Monday, Huff told a judge that she didn't have friends or family to help with the children. The judge told her to focus on her mental health.

Huff's attorney told the court that her client suffered from PTSD, anxiety, paranoia, and depression from an incident where the children's father was charged with choking her in a hotel room.

Prosecutors said Huff initially told police she left the children with a friend but later admitted she had left them unsupervised.

“So the dynamic was probably that she she felt compelled. He’s the father of her children,” Huff's attorney, a public defender, said. “I think there’s probably some battered spouse syndrome in there.”

The children were put in the custody of a trusted relative.

Here's a local news video about the incident:

Teens find 4 abandoned young children in Springwww.youtube.com