A couple have been arrested after police discovered four young children being kept in small, windowless rooms which had been secured shut with plywood and screws.
Daryl Justen Head, 38, and Laura Elizabeth Cheatham, 38, have been charged with five counts of endangering the welfare of a child creating substantial risk and three counts of kidnapping after officers allegedly found the children inside their home in Farmington, Missouri, reports the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
Officers from the St Francois County Sheriff's Department accompanied the Missouri Children's Division Investigators after they received a call to the Child Abuse Hotline from a local resident who expressed concern that children were being forcibly kept inside the home.
When officers arrived, police said Head, the owner of the house, was reluctant to let them inside.
"Once investigators gained entry into the home, they discovered a 38-year-old female removing screws from plywood covering the entrance to small rooms and children coming out from behind the plywood," the department said in a statement.
Police said the rooms in which the children—three girls and one boy aged 5-12—were being held in were "specially constructed" with no windows and no lighting.
"These were boxes actually built within the house in the room with no restroom facilities, no water, they did have an air pipe in there so there was some air conditioning and plywood was screwed over them where no one could get out or anybody could get in," Sheriff Dan Bullock, from the St Francois County Sheriff's Department, told KPLR.
The children were later placed in the care of the Missouri Children's Division. Police believe Cheatham adopted the kids with her estranged husband and two of the children are related.
"When you see a case like this and you see the conditions these kids are living in even for a day, it was way too long, so the fact that they may have been there for weeks or may have been there for any extended period of time our sole concern now is to make sure they are protected and taken care of and to obviously seek justice for the people who were putting them on those conditions," said Prosecuting Attorney Jerrold Mahurin.
Both Head and Cheatham were arrested at the scene on suspicion of child abuse offenses. They are currently being held in lieu of $500,000 bail each .
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