This case makes me so sad. The thought of being locked in an completely dark room with no communication to the outside world beyond my captor's 24/7 camera is terrifying to me. And the dehumanizing toilet treatment of the child, and he was a young child when this training began, is unspeakable. Telling him he should have "held it in...been a man" and "the neighbors don't need to see YOUR pee bucket" is beyond awful. You strip a human of basic dignity, then punish them for human functions? Barbaric. This man is a psychological and physical torture criminal, of a child that was completely under his control.
I'm trying not to think about the normal sexual development that a child and preteen would have during this time. This young boy would not have ever had an opportunity to develop. Whatever he did develop would have been under the scrutiny of 24/7 camera, and complete darkness. The creepiness of this is it's own rabbit hole, I don't want to go down I don't know that anyone even knows what that can do to a child's developing mind, because we don't do experiments that cruel.
This child seems incredibly well spoken, and in my opinion, trying very hard to appear unaffected by the abuse he suffered. I can't imagine what his day to day life must have been like. I only wonder how this affected the other children.
Could this kid ever have play dates? Sleepovers? did his friends come over? Could he even give his number to anyone? If he was having all these problems as defense says records indicate, are there records of therapist visits to try to help? Did the older sister have an relationship issues with him? It sounds as if she never saw him. It certainly seemed as if the younger children didn't see him often.
Then, When he commits an infraction, we hear his "Dad" threaten to take away school and replace it with homeschooling in his cell - thus taking away any form of communication this child has with the outside world, and put him it complete solitary confinement all day, every day - as if this kid's life isn't bad enough already. The "Dad" clearly knows what this means to the child.
These people are unbelievably cruel to this child. It speaks of a horror movie scenario to me. I think they should re-create the interior of the "cell" and that this kid had to find his pee bucket in that darkness to have the privilege of using it, then being shamed and emptying it each morning. They treated him like the monsters that they themselves are. They're not only cruel, they prevent the child from telling others of the cruelty.
I know there wasn't a murder here, but this is horror hiding in plain site, and the defense is putting this child on trial. Awfiul