Waterbury, Connecticut — The inconceivable abuse that Connecticut man said to have suffered at the hands of his stepmother has been said to have lasted more than 20 years.
The victim, now 32, was only 68 pounds when he was rescued from the fire at his Waterbury home last month. He told the police he intentionally set the flames in a desperate bid to free himself from a life of hellish suffering.
For decades, his stepmother, Kimberly Sullivan, was forced to lock him up day and night in a 9-by-8-foot storage space on the second floor of his family's Ramshackle House, he told officers.
According to court documents, he was routinely robbed of food and water, and was forced to eat out from the trash can and drink from the toilet to survive.
Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo said the family first landed on investigators' radar in 2005 when his school reported concerns to the Children and Family Division (DCF) where he visited the home twice.
The victim later told the visitors (when he was 11) that he urged detectives to Sullivan, who is facing charges of assault and lure, to let him out of school forever.
20 years ago, Tom Panone, his principal at Bernard Elementary School; He told NBC Connecticut He knew something was “terribly wrong” after the staff first found the thin child stole food and eating out of the trash.
“Ever since he was five years old, everyone was really interested in this kid. You knew something was wrong. It was so badly wrong,” Panon said.
“We knew that. We reported it. No damn thing was done. That's the whole tragedy.”
In a statement Thursday, DCF expressed sadness over the “unspeakable state” endured by current adult victims, praised him for showing “incredible strength and resilience,” but said there was no record of receiving a report on his behalf.
” [DCF] We have a wide range of current and historical databases and have not been able to find records relating to this family or any other person's names that they have shown to report to our department,” the statement read in part.
DCF noted that under each Connecticut law, unfounded abuse and neglect reports will be removed five years later if no further complaints have been filed.
“We will continue our search and ask anyone with additional information to contact the Waterbury Police Department,” the department wrote.
At a press conference on Thursday, the top Waterbury police officer Spagnolo called the details of the incident “shivering,” and in his 33 years in law enforcement, the Horror of Horrors was “the worst treatment of humanity I've ever witnessed.”
Prosecutors compared his son-in-law to a victim of the Holocaust, describing the surprisingly debilitating man who spent most of his life starving, “without exaggeration, without exaggeration, similar to the survivors of Auschwitz's death camp.”
His 56-year-old stepmother, Sullivan, was arrested Wednesday and charged with first-degree assault, second-degree lure, first-degree unlawful detention, atrocities on people and first-degree reckless danger, maintaining her innocence, according to her lawyers. She gushed out Thursday afternoon after posting $300,000 bonds.
The neighbors may accidentally wander around, including a daughter who swapped waves out of her bedroom window when she shook a backyard swing set more than a decade ago.
“He waved at her, she waved at him, she had no thought of it, but we didn't look at him,” he said. He estimated the “little boy” who spyed on the window of the day.
After his son-in-law's biological father passed away last year, he told investigators that his prisoner became even more restrictive and was locked in a room between 22 and 24 hours a day. He said the threat of longer lockdowns and withholding food would not tell anyone how he was forced to live.
He told detectives he spent endless hours in solitary confinement outside counting cars, or he was listening to local radio station WZBG (“Soft Rock 97.3”) and broadcasting UConn basketball games and WNPR.
He cut his hair and said he hadn't taken a bath in years and had never gone to a dentist. He said that if he bites into a small portion of the food he has been assigned, rotten teeth can be crushed.
He used newspapers and bottles to dispose of the waste, excavating funnels and a series of straws, passing through the window holes.
His son-in-law said that his late father and two half sisters locked him up and didn't actively help him, but they knew his light form well. Although few people have come to the house, when they did, he was threatened with keeping quiet.
“I've been kept secret for the rest of my life,” he told investigators.
