Two 16-year-old twins escaped a house of horrors in Texas where they and their siblings were handcuffed and forced to drink bleach and urine, among other abuses.
The twins escaped early Tuesday morning and were seen on security cameras walking around a neighborhood in Cypress, Texas, looking for help, ABC News reported. The twins eventually knocked on the door of a woman who happened to be an intensive care nurse, who let them inside and called police. The boy was reportedly shirtless and the girl was wearing only a plastic grocery bag, according to a police affidavit obtained by ABC News.
“She was shaking with her handcuffs,” the woman reportedly told a Houston TV station, according to ABC News. “She was like, ‘We are looking for help. We just need help. We just broke out of our handcuffs. Our mom had us handcuffed in the laundry room.’”
The woman photographed the twins’ injuries and called police, saying the girl “was complaining that she couldn’t even close her hand because her hand just felt so tight and swollen from her trying to tug and pull off the handcuffs.” The woman also gave them food and wrapped them in blankets.
“They were so skinny and so frail. They just looked like they had been through a lot,” the woman told KHOU. “They told me that their mom kept them locked in the laundry room, naked, zip tied from the ankles and handcuffed from the wrist.”
The twins were severely malnourished and told police that they had been abused for months by their mother, who they said handcuffed them in the laundry room of their house and forced them to drink bleach and other cleaners “if they talked too much,” the police affidavit said. The twins also told police that they were forced to drink urine and eat feces.
Further, the twins said they weren’t allowed to use the bathroom and were surrounded by feces in the laundry room where they were kept. Both twins had bruises, cuts, and scars all over their bodies, and the boy had at least one fractured bone that had healed on its own, KHOU reported.
“They would only feed them a sandwich, only if they were quiet the whole day, if they made any type of noise they wouldn’t be fed,” the woman who helped them told KHOU. “How a mother could do this to her kids and… I feel like my tears are out of frustration, anger and sadness.”
The twins’ mother, 40-year-old Zaikiya Duncan, was arrested in Louisiana hours after the teens sought help. Police had issued a missing children alert for five other children, leading to her capture. Only one child was with Duncan when she was arrested; the other four were in Louisiana with relatives. All seven children are in Child Protective Service custody.
In addition to Duncan, her live-in boyfriend, 27 year-old Jova Terrell, was also arrested. Neither has been formally charged, but both face assault charges.
Duncan had been previously arrested and charged for child abuse 10 years earlier, when a 5-year-old child of hers was treated for burns, which were determined to be from hot water. The child also had bruises all over his back. Court documents from then also note that police found a 20-month-old child at her home with bound hands.
