US parents get life for torturing 12 children
A California couple who tortured 12 of their 13 children, starving and beating them, depriving them of sleep and sometimes shackling them to their beds with chains, were sentenced on Friday to 25 years to life in prison.
Some of their children gave statements at the sentencing hearing in Riverside, California, saying they were haunted by the abuse, but that they had forgiven and still loved their parents. One daughter told a packed courtroom the suffering “may have been bad, but it made me strong”.
“My parents took my whole life from me, but now I’m taking my life back,” said the woman, now in college. “I’m a fighter. I’m strong.”
The couple, David and Louise Turpin, cried and trembled as four of their children spoke, two of them through intermediaries, in Riverside County Superior Court.
One of the children, a young man studying software engineering at college, said he learnt to ride a bike since being rescued.
“Sometimes, I just go on long rides because I enjoy it so much.”
The children were rescued in January last year 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 much younger because, prosecutors said, her growth had been stunted by the abuse.
The children ranged from age 2 to 29 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.