A California couple has been arrested on charges of torture after authorities on Monday said their 13 malnourished children were held captive in their home, with some shackled to beds in the dark.
Authorities said they were alerted after a 17-year-old girl managed to escape on Sunday and call police using a cellphone she found.
She was so emaciated that officers said they originally thought she was just 10 years old.
The 13 victims in Perris, California, ranged in age from two to 29, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement.
“Further investigation revealed several children shackled to their beds with chains and padlocks in dark and foul-smelling surroundings, but the parents were unable to immediately provide a logical reason why their children were restrained in that manner,” the statement said.
“Deputies located what they believed to be 12 children inside the house, but were shocked to discover that seven of them were actually adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29. The victims appeared to be malnourished and very dirty,” it said.
“The victims were provided with food and beverages after they claimed to be starving,” the sheriff’s office said.
The parents, 57-year-old David Allen Turpin and 49-year-old Louise Anna Turpin, were booked on torture and child endangerment charges with bail set at US$9 million.
The home had three cars and a van with tinted windows. There are indications that the children were allowed outside the house in recent years.
A Facebook page under the name of David-Louise Turpin includes pictures of the couple attending various marriage or exchange-of-vows ceremonies from 2011 to 2016 with their children present.
Neighbor Jamelia Adams, 39, expressed shock.
“It’s just really, really sad. There’s places that kids can go if you don’t want your kids, if you can’t take care of them, and here’s a beautiful neighborhood, brand new housing track, newer cars in the yard, and here’s some kids from 29 to two that was just held captive and malnourished and filthy. It’s just heartbreaking,” Adams said.
“We’ve seen a couple of teenagers maybe last year mowing the lawn, and you know they put some Christmas decorations. Never really thought anything of any sort would happen like that,” said another neighbor, Julio Reyes.
US media reported that the parents had previously filed for bankruptcy.
David Turpin is registered in state records as head of a private school, but its address matches that of the Turpins’ home.
The Los Angeles Times said the couple had lived at the Perris house since 2010 after a move from Texas and they went bankrupt twice.
According to court papers when they filed for bankruptcy in 2011, the couple said they accrued between US$100,000 and US$500,000 in debt opening the school, the New York Times reported.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema