It’s pretty sad how sick and depraved some people can be when they’re being cruel to other people, and it’s even worse when they’re doing it to their own children. The story has been breaking all weekend about the two Carson City kids who had been trapped in a bathroom in their apartment for five years. The Nevada Appeal had this as their front page story on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It seems that the unnamed 16-year-old girl and her 11-year-old brother have been forced to live in a locked bathroom in their Como Street apartment for at least five years. They were beaten with sticks, they were denied food as punishment for talking, and they had to stay in the bathroom while the rest of the family (including three other kids who for some reason weren’t treated this way) watched movies, had friends over for dinner, and went about their normal lives.
The police only found out about this when the 41-pound girl escaped by locking her grandmother in the bathroom and took to the streets with a shopping cart full of food. She told her story to the police, who went back home and confronted the rest of the family. The family denied it at first, saying the girl was crazy and didn’t know what she was talking about, but slowly everything she had been saying proved to be true. Her brother, who only weighed 31 pounds, and who the parents originally said was living in California, was found hiding under a bed. A deadbolt was found on the bathroom door – installed on the outside. And a search of the apartment has turned up sticks that match bruises on the children’s bodies. All the pieces are coming together, and it looks like this unbelievable story is actually true.
This kind of thing doesn’t even compute in my brain. How completely off the ranch do you have to be to lock up your own kids (two of them!) and pretend that they don’t exist while you live a normal life? How can you think that this is an acceptable punishment, for anything they may have done, and carry it out for years and years like this? There are sick people in the world, and they can end up in any town. This bunch just happened to end up in Carson City.
And you have to wonder, how many other kids are locked up in closets and bathrooms out there, that haven’t been found yet?
