A 13-year-old girl escaped Wednesday night from her stepbrother and stepfather, who kept her shackled in a basement in Ohio.
The girl was found more than a mile away from the Toledo, Ohio home outside of a public building, according to Fox 29. She said that she’d often been shackled to a support beam in the basement as punishment for wetting the bed. This imprisonment would last different amounts of time—one time, for nearly a year. The teenager escaped Wednesday using a spare key that she’d smartly hidden in the basement while her relatives went for a jog nearby.
“She was kept in the dark, allowed to sit on a plastic bucket or the concrete floor, and had to defecate and void into a bucket containing ammonia,” the complaint read. Upon investigating the basement, officers found leg irons and a bucket to support the girl’s claims of abuse. The bucket was apparently what the young girl had to use as a toilet.
The Associated Press reported that the father/son duo were caught trying to flee their house in a van with two younger children and their pets when police showed up early Thursday. Timothy Chibaro, 53, and Esten Chibaro, 27, are being held on bond with charges against them for kidnapping and child endangerment. The other children who were with them appeared to be unharmed.
According to Fox News, all three children were placed in foster care Thursday night. The girl had also been in contact with child services before, in 2014. However, officials never removed her from the house because she didn’t show any signs of mistreatment or malnourishment. Whether or not she showed signs of being abused back then, the evidence is clearer now—her stepfamily had seriously mistreated the young teen. Now, they will finally face the courts and face justice.