Three indicted after Ohio girl’s email plea for help

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PORTSMOUTH, Ohio (AP) — Two parents and a grandmother
accused of tying three children to their beds for weeks, beating their
naked bodies with belts and paddles and depriving them of food until one
of them emailed her online school teacher for help were indicted
Tuesday on child endangerment charges.
The indictments came a week
after the three adults were arrested in their home in Wheelersburg, in
southern Ohio’s Appalachian country.
The adults are charged in
Scioto County Common Pleas Court with three counts each of child
endangerment. One of them, a 44-year-old stepfather, also is charged
with raping two of the children, girls ages 9 and 11.
The adults’
attorneys have declined to comment or ignored requests for comment. The
Associated Press is not naming the adults to protect the children’s
identities.
Since at least May, the three adults are accused of
tying and chaining the girls and their 8-year-old brother to their beds
so they were "unable to move or get out of the bed" for weeks at a time,
according to arrest documents filed in Portsmouth Municipal Court.
The
stepfather, who’s from the Virgin Islands, is accused of raping each
girl multiple times while forcing the other to watch, the documents
said.
The children also described being forced to take their
clothes off to be beaten, and they had scars to match their stories,
Scioto County sheriff’s Capt. David Hall said last week.
A school administrator said last week she was proud of the teacher, who called 911 to get help for the
children.
Hall
said the children, who were removed from the home last week, are in
foster care and are attending public school. He said they seem to be
doing well and are enjoying normalcy, perhaps for the first time in
their lives.
"They told us," he said, "they never had ice cream or a milkshake before."
A 2-year-old girl not believed to have been harmed has joined her siblings in their foster home.
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