Two girls, ages 5 and 4, were neglected by their parents, James and Anne Cardona. The Cardonas claimed to be homeschooling them.

The 5-year-old had rotten teeth and hair that was matted and filled with lice; the 4-year-old was still in diapers. The girls were severely obese and had difficulty walking: the 5-year-old weighed 158 pounds and the 4-year-old weighed 89. The girls spent most of their days locked up inside the house, which was filled with cockroaches and giant spiders which repeatedly bit them.

The abuse came to light when police responded to a domestic dispute at the Cardonas’ house and encountered the girls. The Cardonas were charged with felony child cruelty and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Date: August 16, 2010
Location: Marietta, Georgia

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Seven children—boys ages 11, 7, 6, 6, 2, and 18 months, and a girl of unknown age—were medically neglected and starved by their parents, Adrienne Bartholomew and James Brothers, and their grandmother Debra Nelson. The children were homeschooled: the 11-year-old attended online school, and the 7-, 6-, and 6-year-old boys had individual education plans whereby they attended the public school one day per week to receive special education services. Five of the children (the 7-year-old, the two 6-year-olds, the 2-year-old, and the 18-month-old) were disabled by a rare genetic disorder that made them unable to retain healthy fat deposits.

Despite the children’s complex medical needs and the presence of the children’s grandmother as an in-home caregiver, the 11-year-old boy was primarily responsible for caring for and feeding his younger siblings while the adults in the home neglected them, bathing them only once a week and cleaning the house only in preparation for social worker visits.

The abuse came to light when the 18-month-old, Isaac Brothers-Bartholomew, died of dehydration and malnourishment and his parents called the police. When the other children were rescued, they were covered in vomit and urine and severely malnourished—one of the 6-year-olds weighed only 23 pounds. Bartholomew, Brothers, and Nelson were each charged with involuntary manslaughter, endangering children, and patient endangerment. Brothers was sentenced to six years in prison while Bartholomew received three.

Date: November 6, 2012
Location: Vermilion Township, Ohio

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Six girls and five boys, ages 10 months to 18 years, were severely neglected by their parents, Jeremy and Christine Long. The children were second-generation homeschoolers—their father, Jeremy Long, had been homeschooled and wanted the same for his children. However, when the children were rescued, they were illiterate and “didn’t know the days of the week, their ABC’s, or even how to spell their own names.” There was no food in the house and the youngest children were malnourished.

The Longs had begun living together when Jeremy was 16 and Christine was 17; their oldest child Miranda was born when they were 18 and 19 respectively. All the children were homebirthed and never received vaccinations or dental care. The Long children spent their lives “without food, water, electricity, heat, education, medical care, bedding or proper clothing and shoes.”

The Longs lost custody of their children and were charged with cruelty to children and failure to educate. Jeremy Long was sentenced to three years in prison; Christine Long did not receive prison time.

Date: July 31, 2008
Location: Hephzibah, Georgia

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Three boys, ages 12, 11, and 8, were tortured by their grandparents, James and Cheri Crawford. The boys had been pulled from school to be homeschooled.

The boys had come to live with their grandparents after their father was murdered and their mother, a drug addict, abandoned them. The boys were starved and forced to eat spoiled food; they often had only a bucket for a bathroom. They were forced to do heavy manual labor and to stand at attention outside for hours at a time. The oldest boy was imprisoned in a trailer for a year and a half and spent most of the time blindfolded, resulting in a forehead scar. The 11-year-old was forced to shock his older brother with a shock collar and also had to sleep outside in a storage shed.

The abuse came to light when a neighbor witnessed Cheri abusing one of the children and called the authorities. Cheri and James Crawford entered Alford pleas and were sentenced to 8 and 7 years in prison, respectively.

Date: July 2009
Location: Hartsville, South Carolina

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Twenty-eight children adopted from Haiti (ranging in age from infant to 11 years when adopted in 1987), several with special needs, were neglected and physically abused by their parents, Kathy and Dan Blackburn. Several of the girls also reported being sexually abused by Dan Blackburn and, it is suggested, by their older brothers. The children were homeschooled. The Blackburns also had two biological sons (ages 20 and 18 in 1987) who were not abused.

The abuse came to light when some of the girls reported the sexual abuse to Kathy and she filed for divorce. Custody of the children was first awarded to Dan Blackburn but eventually awarded to Kathy Blackburn. Many of the children were subsequently enrolled in public school.

Date: 1995
Location: Shelbyville, Indiana

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Two children—Kierra King, born in 2000, and Jeziah King (right), born in 2007—were physically abused by their mother, Latisha Lawson (left). Kierra was homeschooled.

Lawson lived with the children’s father, Lawrence King, until October 2009. After they broke up, she moved in with her friend Natasha Hawkins and Hawkins’ three children. At this time Lawson began homeschooling Kierra and beating her with a belt and extension cords; she also became convinced that Jeziah and the other children were possessed by demons. In November 2009, Lawson forced all five children to undergo an exorcism ritual whereby they had to ingest olive oil and vinegar. When Jeziah refused, Lawson murdered him by suffocating him. She then kept his body in her bed for about a month and continued to leave him unburied for approximately one year. During this time Kierra was sometimes forced to touch his body as punishment.

The murder came to light after Lawson had moved out of Hawkins’ home, taking Jeziah’s body with her in a plastic bin. In December 2010, police officers performed a welfare check in Hawkins’ home and Hawkins revealed that Jeziah had been murdered. The police then located Lawson, who confessed. She was found guilty of murder, neglect of a dependent, and battery. She was sentenced to 61 years in prison.

Date: December 20, 2010
Location: Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Six girls—Jeanne Orlando (left), Amy Eddy (second from left), Desiree Kolbek (second from right), Pebbles Rodriguez, Jamie Rodriquez, and Summer Hagan—were taken as child brides and sexually abused by Tony Alamo, a fundamentalist minister and leader of the cultlike Tony Alamo Christian Ministries. Jeanne was 15, Amy was 14, Desiree was 8, and Pebbles was 12 when they were first raped by Alamo. A seventh girl, Nicole Farr (right), was 15 when she escaped from Alamo’s compound, having been told she would be his next bride.

Dozens of other children were also sexually, physically, and emotionally abused by the group, which also had branches in Indiana, California, Colorado, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. None of the children in the group received social security numbers or vaccinations. Although Alamo claimed that all the children were homeschooled, their homeschool program was not registered and Anthony Lane, the father of three other children in Alamo’s group (9-year-old Tim, 11-year-old Sarah, and 13-year-old Ashley, whom he had seen married to a 40-year-old man), stated that “They don’t do much schooling though, for someone who claims they home school their kids. I didn’t see a whole lot of kids going to school every day.”

Tony Alamo was arrested and charged with transporting minors across state lines to engage in sex. He was sentenced to 175 years in prison. Many of the parents in his group lost custodial rights to their children.

Date: September 20, 2008
Location: Fouke, Arkansas

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Four children—Richard Felsch (right), b. 1988; his twin sisters, b. 1987; and an unrelated boy, b. 1995—were imprisoned and physically and sexually abused by Sylvia and Michael Wenger (left), their adoptive parents. The children were homeschooled. It is unknown whether the Wengers’ biological children were also abused.

Three of the children were placed with the Wengers in 1996 after they were abused in their biological mother’s home. The fourth boy later joined them. At the Wengers’, the children were beaten with boards, “forced to stand in a corner for hours, locked into closets and force-fed for punishment.” The twin girls and the youngest boy were also repeatedly raped by Michael Wenger, who had begun dating his wife Sylvia when she was 14 and he was 21.

The abuse came to light in 2001 when one of the girls escaped and reported it to the authorities. The Wengers served 7 years in prison.

Date: 2001
Location: Chewelah, Washington

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Five girls, ages 4 to 11, were starved, beaten, and sexually abused by their adoptive mother, Jessica Banks. The girls were removed from public school in 2004 shortly after their adoption. Banks was the pastor of the Word of Life Apostolic Church, a “satanic cult” where the girls were homeschooled.

The children began living with Banks in 2000 after they were removed from their abusive birth family. Banks made them sleep in an unheated room in her garage and wear two layers of diapers under long black dresses. The girls were beaten daily with various objects, forced to eat spoiled food and clean Banks’ house. Banks drugged them with sleeping pills and raped two of them while the others watched.

Banks was arrested after one of the girls, age 6, was found emaciated and bruised on the pavement near the church. Banks was sentenced to life in prison.

Date: June 2005
Location: Moreno Valley, California

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Seven children—two boys and five girls ranging in age from 3 months to 19 years—were imprisoned and physically and sexually abused for fifteen years by their father, Jeffrey York. At least one of the girls was York’s stepdaughter. The children’s mother, Danita York, was also abused. The children were homeschooled.

York forced his wife and children to dress in 18th-century-style clothing and kept them isolated from the outside world. Between September 1996 and October 1997 he raped one of the girls, who was younger than 13. One of the other girls was imprisoned in “an 8-by-10-foot bedroom for almost a year” and beaten with a hobby horse.

The abuse came to light when Danita York reported the rapes to the police in 2009. Jeffrey York was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Date: December 2009
Location: Madison Township, Ohio

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Gregory Jean Jr., age 13, was imprisoned, starved, beaten, and forced to work as a maid for four years by his father, Gregory Jean Sr., and his stepmother Samantha Joy Davis. Davis’ biological children were also abused—she “was on probation for cutting her biological son’s tongue with a pair of hot scissors in 2004″—but they were not imprisoned or starved as Gregory was. After Gregory reported the abuse to a school counselor and investigators failed to substantiate the claim, he was withdrawn from school to be homeschooled, which consisted of copying words out of the dictionary.

Gregory first went to visit with Jean and Davis in 2010, but Jean insisted that he stay to avoid having to pay child support payments to Gregory’s biological mother, Lisa Smith. Though Gregory was initially treated well, eventually he was forced to sleep in the garage with a bucket as a toilet and forbidden from celebrating Christmas with the family. When Davis was not pleased with his schoolwork or his labor, she beat him with a stick and deprived him of food.

The abuse finally came to light when Gregory managed to contact Smith, who had reported him missing. After a long search of the house, police finally found him hidden behind a wall. Jean and Davis were each charged with false imprisonment, cruelty to children, and obstruction. Davis’ three teenaged children who lived in the home were also charged with obstruction.

Date: November 29, 2014
Location: Jonesboro, Georgia

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Two children—E., a 6-year-old boy, and R., a 1-year-old girl—were starved, beaten, and emotionally abused by their adoptive parents, Kristen and Douglas Barbour. The Barbours’ two biological children, ages 2 and 4, were not abused. E. was homeschooled.

E. and R. were adopted from Ethiopia in March 2012. The Barbours were active in their local church and Douglas Barbour was a former deputy attorney general, but they were not prepared for parenting two internationally adopted children. When E. had incontinence issues, they forced him to stand in a dark bathroom as punishment. He was told that his body was unsafe for other people and limited in which bathrooms he could use and which food he could eat. He was also thrown to the ground and hit his head. R. was also abused, although it is unknown what exactly the Barbours did to her.

The abuse came to light in October 2012 when child welfare officials at the hospital noticed that E. had lost 10 pounds since his adoption and that R. had multiple head fractures in various stages of healing. When they were removed from the Barbours’ home, E. had “lesions from being kept in urine-soaked clothing for long periods of time” and R. had permanent brain damage. The Barbours pleaded no contest to child endangerment and Kristen Barbour was sentenced to 6 to 12 months in prison. Douglas Barbour was sentenced to probation and they were allowed to keep custody of their biological children.

Date: October 4, 2012
Location: Franklin Park, Pennsylvania

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A 15-year-old boy was punched in the face by his mother, Estella Rosendo, after defending his 11-year-old brother from her. The boys were homeschooled.

Rosendo was arrested for child abuse.

Date: May 5, 2009
Location: Port St. Lucie, Florida

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Two children, a 15-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, were imprisoned and physically abused by their parents, Kimberly Joy Quebe and John Herman Quebe. The Quebes claimed to be homeschooling, but they did not follow any of the requirements and the children were not at grade level.

The children spent long periods of time with their wrists and ankles tied; the boy spent hours locked in his room. The Quebes also verbally abused their children. The abuse came to light when someone observed the children’s restraint marks at the community pool and called in a tip. The Quebes pleaded guilty to false imprisonment, child abuse, and corporal injury on a child and were sentenced to 12 years in prison. Because there was no trial, more details of the physical abuse were not made public.

Date: July 21, 2008
Location: Anaheim, California

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Eight children—seven girls, of whom Aziza Kibibi, b. 1978, was the oldest, and one boy—were physically and sexually abused by their father, Aswad Ayinde, a music producer for The Fugees. The children’s mother, Beverly, knew about the abuse and did nothing to stop it. The children were all homebirthed and homeschooled, as Ayinde opposed birth certificates and modern medicine.

Ayinde began raping Aziza when she was 8 years old and eventually fathered four children with her, several of whom had a rare genetic disorder due to inbreeding (Aziza and four of her children are pictured above). He also raped four of his other daughters and fathered a child with two of them as part of a plan to create his own “pure blood” race. He starved the children and beat them “using wooden boards and steel-toed boots”. He kept them isolated and forbade them from watching TV.

The abuse came to light for the first time when Aziza’s grandmother alerted the authorities; however, the investigation was unsuccessful. Social services got involved again when Aziza brought her sick child to the hospital; around that time, in 2003, Beverly and Aswad Ayinde separated and the children went to live with their mother. Aziza and her sisters did not decide to press charges until 2006 when they discovered Ayinde had young daughters with other women who were in danger of abuse. Ayinde was sentenced to 90 years in prison for the rapes.

Date: 2006
Location: Paterson, New Jersey

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Three boys, born in 1983, 1985, and 1986, were sexually abused by Rev. Douglas W. Myers, the minister at Bayside Baptist Church. The boy who was born in 1985 was homeschooled at the church by Myers between seventh and ninth grade (that is, around 1998); it is unknown if the other boys were also homeschooled.

The abuse came to light in 2012 when the boy born in 1983 wrote a letter to police to report it and an investigation turned up the other two victims. At that time, Myers was already in prison for sexually abusing the grandson of a parishioner in Eustis, Florida from July 2005 until his arrest on February 24, 2006. He was sentenced to 15 more years in prison for abusing the three Maryland boys.

Date: 1998
Location: Chesapeake Beach, Maryland

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Jessica Crank, age 15, died of bone cancer which her mother, Jacqueline Crank, and stepfather Ariel Ben Sherman left untreated. When she died, she had a tumor the size of a basketball. Jessica was homeschooled.

Sherman, who had been convicted of child abuse in Oregon in 1987, was the leader of the Universal Life Church, a cult-like group which practiced faith healing. In February 2002, Sherman and Crank took Jessica to a chiropractor, who urged them to immediately take her to an emergency room. They did not do so. It was not until June 2002 that authorities were successful in getting medical attention for Jessica. She died in September 2002.

Sherman and Crank were convicted of misdemeanor child neglect.

Date: September 15, 2002
Location: Lenoir City, Tennessee

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Thirteen children—ranging in age from 8 months to 15 years—were starved, imprisoned, beaten, and medically neglected by their father, Winnfred Wright (left), and his four wives (from left to right) Carol Bremner, Deirdre Wilson, Mary Campbell, and Kali Polk-Matthews. Wright’s fifth wife, Susan Weber, who had left Wright’s cultlike home around 1990, had two additional children with him (one of whom died in infancy). The children were homeschooled.

The children were beaten with a belt, had their mouths covered with tape, and were forced to eat chili peppers as punishment. One girl was “tied to a playpen at night for two weeks as punishment for eating during a fast”. The children were kept to a strict vegetarian diet and many of them had bone deformities due to poor nutrition. They were not permitted to leave the house and the windows were often covered. The children never visited the doctor or dentist and most were found to have rickets when they were rescued.

The abuse came to light in 2001 when 19-month-old Ndigo Campisi-Nyah-Wright died of malnutrition and the women brought him to the emergency room. Authorities then removed the other children from the home. Bremner, who had leukemia, died in state custody, and the charges against Polk-Matthews were dropped. The others pleaded guilty to child endangerment; Wright was sentenced to 16 years in prison, Campbell to 10, and Wilson to 7.

Date: November 13, 2001
Location: Marinwood, California

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Two girls—A.S., age 16, and L.S., a.k.a. Healed Travesser (pictured), age 14—were sexually abused by Wayne Bent, a.k.a. Michael Travesser (pictured). The girls were the children of John and Elsa Sayer, who were members of the Lord Our Righteousness Church or Strong City, a new religious movement led by Bent, who claimed he was the Messiah. The girls were homeschooled.

John Sayer and his family left the church around August 2006 after Bent told him God had ordered him to sleep with seven virgins, including Sayer’s two daughters. The younger girl later returned to Bent’s compound on her own and was removed by social services along with two other children in April 2008. Bent was found guilty of criminal sexual contact of a minor (committed against the older girl) and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Bent was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Date: April 22, 2008
Location: Clayton, New Mexico

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Dayna Lorrae Broussard, age 8, was beaten to death by four adults—Willie K. Chambers, Brian J. Brinson, Constance Zipporah Jackson and Frederick Paul Doolittle—in the Ecclesia Athletic Association, a new religious movement run by Dayna’s father, Eldridge Broussard Jr. After her death, 53 other children were removed from the compound, showing signs of systematic beating and food deprivation. The children were homeschooled.

Chambers, Brinson, Jackson, and Doolittle were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Broussard, along with three other members of the group, was later indicted for child slavery; Broussard died of natural causes before he could be brought to trial.

Date: October 13, 1988
Location: Sandy, Oregon

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