The woman accused of keeping her starving stepson locked away in a house of horrors for decades may have gotten away with the horrific abuse because of Connecticut’s unregulated homeschooling system.
The tragic victim, now 32, told police after his daring escape from his deplorable confines at the Waterbury home last month that he was yanked out of school by his stepmom in just the fourth grade — and essentially vanished into a life of hell.
“Once he was pulled from school, his weekday routine and captivity became brutally consistent for the rest of his life,” police said based on their interview with the tortured man, according to a criminal complaint against his stepmother, 56-year-old Kimberly Sullivan.
Connecticut does not have clear guidelines for ensuring that a child is being properly and safely homeschooled, meaning the state basically loses all contact with a child once they leave school, said Sarah Eagan of the Center for Children’s Advocacy, a legal rights law firm for children, to NBC News.
“When a child is dis-enrolled from school, with a caregiver saying, ‘I’m withdrawing my child to home school,’ that kind of ends it. That’s the end. There is no, ‘We’ll meet again. We’ll verify,’ ” Eagan said.
“Connecticut has no system for that and has been reluctant to create a system yet,” she said.
To remove a child from public school in Connecticut, parents “should” formally submit paperwork to the school district showing their intention to homeschool their children, according to state regulations reviewed by NBC.
The parents are also supposed to keep a portfolio for each homeschool child showing “samples of activities, assignments, projects and assessments, as well as a log of books and materials used,” the regulation states.
But the regulations do not appear to have any real means of enforcement.
Even when the boy was still in the public school system, he allegedly horribly fell through the cracks.
The former principal at Barnard Elementary School, Tom Pannone, has said the school alerted the state’s Department of Children and Families to apparent serious issues with the family as early as 2005, after seeing the alarmingly thin boy, a student there at the time, stealing food and eating from the garbage.
The calls warranted visits from DFS, prompting Sullivan, who now faces charges of assault and kidnapping, to pull the child out of school, never to be seen again.
Once the boy was gone, Pannone said, there was no real recourse for his former school to follow up — although the then-principal even personally knocked on the family’s door in a futile attempt to get some answers.
“You could just simply withdraw your child from school, and you didn’t even have to make a plan for homeschooling. It was a very lax system, and a lot of parents would just say, ‘I’m homeschooling them,’ and that was it,” he said.
The stepson told police after he was rescued that once he left elementary school, he never received any additional learning at the house.
Sullivan was arrested and charged this week over the pattern of shocking abuses of her stepson that authorities compared to “a horror movie.”
The victim, who weighed just 68 pounds at age 32, was forced to live in gut-wrenching conditions in a padlocked storage space until he deliberately set the house of horrors on fire Feb. 17 to free himself after more than 20 years.
Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo told reporters Thursday that the details of the case are “shuddering” — and that in his 33 years in law enforcement, the victim’s living conditions were “the worst treatment of humanity that I’ve ever witnessed.”
The severely abused man was given minimal access to food and water — often drinking from the toilet bowl — and forced to relieve himself in bottles and on newspapers, police said.
Prosecutors likened the stepson’s treatment to that of Holocaust victims, “without exaggeration, akin to a survivor of Auschwitz’s death camp.”
Sullivan made posted a $300,000 bond after less than 24 hours behind bars.
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