The firefighter scooped up the figure slumped on the kitchen floor and dashed for the ambulance waiting on Blake Street. As he moved through the smoky haze, he was struck by a thought that is still with him: It was like nothing was in his arms.
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As the ambulance sped toward the hospital, emergency medical technicians administered oxygen; one reflexively commented on the overpowering smell. Right away, as if to apologize, the patient spoke up. It had been more than a year since he had been permitted to shower, he said.
A police officer in the vehicle leaned in.
The patient started speaking and did not stop. He gave his name, said that he was 32 years old and had spent most of his life held captive by his father and stepmother, who locked him in his room for some 23 hours a day.
At the hospital, he continued his story. He had been trapped for two decades, forced to defecate into newspapers and to funnel his urine out the second-story window. He hadn’t seen a doctor or a dentist in 20 years. Sometimes he was fed a sandwich. His teeth were so decayed they often broke when he ate. He was 5-foot-9, but he weighed only 68 pounds.
The ride in the ambulance, he said, was the first time he had been let out of the house since he was 12.
Then, he made a confession. He was the one who set the fire. He used a lighter forgotten in the pocket of an old jacket that his stepmother had given him. If he did not die in the fire, he had reasoned, he might finally be set free.
Kimberly Sullivan at her arraignment, with her lawyers, Jason Spilka, left, and Ioannis Kaloidis.Pool photo by Jim Shannon
The revelations that began in that ambulance ride on Feb. 17 cracked wide one of the most shocking secrets to ever tarnish Waterbury, a small, former manufacturing city in the southern part of Connecticut. The police now believe what the man said in the ambulance that evening: For the past 20 years, an 8- by 9-foot room on the top floor of a disheveled house at 2 Blake Street was a prison cell for a boy — now a man — last seen by the outside world when he was in the fourth grade.
But many in the community had feared for the boy’s safety for a long time.
For years before the man’s disappearance, his teachers, classmates, neighbors and his elementary school principal all believed he was suffering silently. They repeatedly called the Waterbury Police and the Connecticut Department of Children and Families to intercede for a child they said was so hungry that he ate from the trash and stole his classmates’ food.
Many reports that may have documented these calls have since been lost, but what records remain show that responding authorities determined the boy was doing OK.
After a while, without turning up any evidence of abuse, the calls stopped coming. In fact, until the fire, the last recorded police visit concerning the boy on Blake Street was April 18, 2005, in response to a call placed by his own father. He summoned officers to complain that he was being harassed by people continually checking up on his child.
That year, his son was pulled from school, purportedly to be educated at home. In interviews with police officers last month, the man told them that for a brief time he received school work sheets, but all formal education stopped shortly after. The next time he left his home, 20 years later, it was in the arms of the firefighter.
Steve Brownell, a detective with the Waterbury Police Department, was one of the first officers to hear the story of the man who says he was held captive for two decades.Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
“He looked,” said Detective Steve Brownell of the Waterbury Police Department, who interviewed him later at the hospital, “like a Holocaust survivor.”
Late last month, the man’s stepmother, Kimberly Sullivan, 57, was arraigned in Waterbury Superior Court. She has been charged with kidnapping, assault, cruelty, unlawful restraint and reckless endangerment. If convicted of all charges, she could serve the rest of her life in prison. Last month, she pleaded not guilty.
“She is adamant that she had done nothing wrong,” her lawyer, Ioannis Kaloidis, said in an interview. Mr. Kaloidis laid blame on the biological father, Kregg Sullivan, who died in January of last year. (The biological mother had given up her parental rights to Mr. Sullivan, to whom she was briefly married.)
“They make it look as if Kim Sullivan made all the decisions, that she pulled him out of school, that she decided what he was or wasn’t going to eat, that she decided when he went to the doctor,” Mr. Kaloidis added. “She was not the child’s mother.”
Speaking at
a news conference last week, Mr. Kaloidis disputed the man’s claims of captivity. “Where are the handcuffs,” he asked. “Where are the chains? Where are the signs of restraint? It doesn’t add up.”
In addition to her stepson, Mrs. Sullivan also had two younger daughters with Mr. Sullivan — Alissa, now 29, and Jamie, now 27 — who seemed to be free to come and go as they pleased. (The women’s biological relationships to the Sullivans are unclear.) In fact, several neighbors on Blake Street said they never knew there was a third child.
The man, who is recuperating at a Connecticut medical center, has not yet made a public statement. (The police have not released a photograph of him, nor have they released his name because they say he is a victim of domestic abuse.) A conservator, whose identity has not been made public, has been appointed by the court to protect the man’s interests. The Times asked both the Waterbury mayor and the state’s attorney to forward requests for comment to the man but received no response.
At a hearing where a judge ordered Mrs. Sullivan to wear an ankle monitor while on bail, Donald E. Therkildsen Jr., an attorney representing the state, told the court that when he met with the victim, “his first question was, ‘Why is she out walking around while I was locked up in a room for 20 years?’”
As he heals, the city is grappling with the failure of the authorities who were entrusted to help him. And another, more troubling question persists: How could this have happened to a child that so many people were so worried about?
THEY KEPT THIS shyt
