NEW HAVEN, Conn.— A man in Connecticut told police that his stepmother kept him locked up in their home for 20 years, starting when he was a boy. He has now asked why she is not in jail while she waits to be tried, a state lawyer said Friday.
This was said by Don Therkildsen Jr., a senior assistant state’s attorney, at a court hearing in Waterbury for Kimberly Sullivan, who pleaded not guilty to charges of kidnapping and felony assault on Friday. Sullivan was told to be electronically monitored, and Therkildsen asked to be put under house arrest because she was afraid Sullivan would run away.
“This person is scared.” “This person is scared all the time,” Therkildsen said in court. “I told the victim who I was and introduced myself.” “Why is she out walking around when I was locked up for 20 years?” is the first thing that scares him.
While she was being held on March 12, Sullivan, 57, made $300,000 bail. She has denied that she locked her stepson in a small room in their Waterbury home and didn’t let him drink or eat much. When he was found, he weighed only 69 pounds (31 kilogrammes). It takes 1.75 metres to make him 5 feet 9 inches tall.
Ioannis Kaloidis, Sullivan’s lawyer, said he didn’t agree with the request for house arrest and that Sullivan has followed all the rules since she made bail. Another thing he said was that Sullivan has been threatened and that putting her under house arrest in one place would put her in danger.
Police say the 32-year-old guy set fire to the house on February 17 to get away. He was saved by firemen and taken to the hospital, where staff said he was severely undernourished and looked like he was going to die.
He told the cops that since he was about 11 years old, he had been locked in the small room with no heat or air conditioning for most of the days. The only time he was let out was to do chores for a short time. His dad, Kregg Sullivan, let him leave the room for longer times, but cops say he died last year.
He always said he was hungry. Police say that he was kicked out of Waterbury’s public schools in 2004 after teachers called state child welfare officials to worry about his safety. He was going to be taught at home, it looked like.
Authorities in the state and localities are trying to figure out how this could have happened. Some people are calling for more strict control of homeschooling.
Police in Waterbury said they went to Sullivan’s house twice in 2005 and found nothing to worry about.
A man named Tom Pannone used to be the principal of the elementary school he went to as a child. He told WVIT-TV that school officials called Sullivan and the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) many times because they were worried that he was too thin and stealing food and eating things out of the trash.
DCF workers went to the house, but it’s not clear what they did, according to the police. The man told the police that Sullivan took away his food if he didn’t tell the police everything was fine.
DCF had said before that it couldn’t find any records about the family right away. The agency said on Friday that it had found some records in its files and was going through them.
Officials wouldn’t give out information about the records right away, but they did say they would give them to police and state officials after they searched for and looked over them.
