Saturday, 22 October 2022 – The 16-year-old twins, whose escape from home was captured on doorbell camera footage while they pleaded with neighbours for help, suffered extreme abuse which has now been detailed in police documents.
The twins escaped an alleged house of horrors’ in Texas after they were subject to various tortures at home including being made to drink urine and cleaning fluids, being burned with bleach, and beaten with extension cords, according to new court papers.
The twins were found emaciated and near-naked on September 18 after they broke free from handcuffs and banged on a neighbor’s home.
The neighbor took them in and called police, prompting the twins’ mother, Zaikiya Duncan, 40, and her boyfriend, Jova Terrell, 27, to flee with her five other children to Louisiana.
They have both since been arrested and now face child abuse charges.
All seven children have been placed into care.
Investigators spoke to the two teens to compile charging documents, in which they detailed the abuse they allegedly suffered and how they escaped.
In the documents, obtained by KHOU 11, the boy and girl said their mother poured bleach in their mouths and on their genitals until it burned their skin and made them drink cleaning products because they “talked too much.”
They were fed Benadryl tablets until the boy had a seizure and they were also beaten with extension cords, curtain rods and other implements.
The teens also said they were kept naked and handcuffed in a small laundry room and had to keep silent all day or they would be beaten. They also had to defecate and urinate on themselves and had only a dirty mop to wipe it off.
The only food they were given were sandwiches of mustard, bologna or relish a couple of times a week.
Authorities said they were severely malnourished when they were found.
The boy managed to escape after he found the key to their handcuffs in Duncan’s purse and hid it in his mouth. He then unlocked himself and his twin sister, broke the zip ties around their legs and ran out of the house.
KHOU obtained Ring doorbell footage showing the malnourished 16-year-olds, a boy and a girl, going door-to-door in a Cypress, Texas, subdivision for about 30 minutes, pleading for help at around 5 a.m. Tuesday morning, October, October 18.
“Do you need some help?” a man’s voice asks through the camera.
“Yes, please, can you let us in, please?” one of the teens, who is shirtless, says meekly.
“What happened?” the man responds before the other teen says, “We just need somewhere to be right now.”
The man says, “No, we can’t do that.”
Unsure of the circumstances, most neighbors turn the teens away before one woman, a single mother at home with her daughter, lets them inside.
“I just knew they were kids right away, so I quickly opened the door,” the woman told the outlet. “I told them to come in and I quickly shut the door and I locked it.”
“They were so skinny and so frail. They just looked like they had been through a lot,” she added.
The doorbell camera showed one of the teens taking out the handcuffs to show the woman.
Pictures obtained by KHOU showed the children with marks from the handcuffs around their wrists and ankles and scars on their bodies.
“I sat them down, I brought them blankets, covered them up. And the first thing the little boy said was, ‘We’re starving,’” the woman said. “The little girl was here standing, and she was visibly shaking and showing me her handcuffs, saying, ‘We just broke out of these.'”
The woman brought them into her kitchen, fed them, called the police and sought more information.
After they were rescued, the malnourished teenagers were taken to hospital.
Officers set about locating their mother, her boyfriend and their siblings — aged 14, 10, 7 and 12-year-old twins – but they had fled to Louisiana. An Amber Alert was issued and the parents were identified and arrested by local police.
Details about Duncan and Terrell started to emerge Thursday, October 20, including that she had a previous record for child abuse, after she allegedly scalded one of her then-five year children with hot water.
Terrell is a wannabe rapper who goes by the name YBG Joker.
The family had recently moved into a brand new $600,000 home in Cypress, Texas, with neighbors saying they had only been living in the home for two weeks.
The home includes four bedrooms and a grand staircase.
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