“My parents took my whole life from me, but now I’m taking my life back,” one of the children, a young woman who is now in college, said in a statement she read to the court.
The children were rescued in January 2018 after one of the girls worked up the courage to escape by jumping from a window of the suburban Los Angeles home where they had been kept prisoner. She called 911 from a cellphone she had grabbed from the house and in a calm, clear voice described the years of abuse to a police dispatcher.
“I’ve never been out. I don’t go out much,” the girl told the dispatcher. She was 17, but her voice sounded like that of a much younger child, because, prosecutors said, her growth had been stunted by the abuse.
Now the parents, David and Louise Turpin, are likely to spend the rest of their lives locked up. The Turpins were sentenced after pleading guilty in February in Riverside County Superior Court to torture and other abuse and neglect so severe that it left two of their daughters unable to bear children.
The parents will be eligible for parole after the minimum time has elapsed, but Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin has said that unless a parole board decides otherwise, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison. After ruining the lives of their children, he said, it was fitting justice.
The children ranged from 2 to 29 years old when they were found. Some were emaciated and appeared to have cognitive deficiencies from the abuse. Only the toddler did not appear to have been abused, authorities said.
Since being removed from the home, the children are healing and beginning to live more normal lives, authorities said. The seven adult children were living together and attending school in February, when their parents pleaded guilty.
To their neighbors, the family seemed normal, if reclusive. David Turpin, 57, had been an engineer for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Louise Turpin, 50, apparently stayed home. They lived in a nondescript stucco home in a middle-class neighborhood of the city of Perris, about an hour’s drive southeast of Los Angeles. Neighbors rarely saw the children outside the home. It was neatly kept on the outside, and so did not arouse suspicion. But it reeked of human waste on the inside, where the children were often not released from their shackles to go to the bathroom.
“We live in filth,” the 17-year-old said in the 911 call. “Sometimes I wake up and I can’t breathe because of how dirty the house is.” She said she had not bathed for almost a year.
The children were forced to stay up at night and sleep during the day. They were given carefully rationed meals — generally only one meal, a combination of lunch and dinner — per day. The meals often consisted of bologna or peanut butter sandwiches.
During the 911 call, the girl said that some of her siblings were tied up, and the dispatcher asked how many of them were restrained. “Two of my sisters, one of my brothers,” the girl replied. The dispatcher asked if they were tied with rope. “With chains,” the girl said. “They’re chained up to their beds.”
A 29-year-old daughter weighed just 82 pounds, and a 12-year-old sibling was the size of a 7-year-old, authorities said. The children appeared to lack a basic knowledge of life, and many of them did not know what a police officer was when they were found.
The parents registered the residence as a private school, called Sandcastle Day School, and so were able to avoid questions about why their six school-aged children were not in school, authorities said. Before the children were rescued, neither law enforcement nor child protective services had had any contact with the Turpin family.
The apparent abuse of the home-schooling rules put state and local officials on the defensive about whether home-schooling families were adequately monitored. The state’s Department of Education said it had registered the school but had never been inside.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.