6-year-old and 2-year-old locked in cages for hours while parents worked, Florida cops say
Two parents are accused of locking their kids in makeshift cages for hours at a time while they worked, sometimes overnight or when they left the house, Florida police said.
The Department of Children and Families began investigating the couple when their 6-year-old son told a school worker he didn’t want to go home because he would be put in a cage his dad built, according to Dec. 8 arrest reports from the Gainesville Police Department.
His parents, ages 31 and 35, are both employees of the University of Florida, police said.
McClatchy News is not identifying the parents to protect the identity of their children.
As part of the investigation, officers visited the child’s home where both the 6-year-old and his 2-year-old sibling live with their parents.
When they entered the boy’s bedroom, officers saw a “large unsanded, wooden enclosure made of pressure-treated 2x4’s, that appeared to be a makeshift cage,” according to the arrest reports.
The cage had a door with two stainless steel barrel bolts holding it closed, police said, and rails with only a few inches of space to look out.
The 6-year-old told officers his dad had built the cage for him, and he would be put inside when he came home from school, sometimes until he had to leave again for school the next morning at 7 a.m., according to the arrest reports.
Other times, the child was put in the cage when he came home from school while his mother was still working and would be let out of the cage once his father came home from work at the university, police said.
The 6-year-old told officers he was forced to wear “pull-ups,” a type of diaper for toddlers, when he was in the cage overnight but could use the bathroom during the day, the report said.
The child’s sibling, a toddler, was placed in a different kind of makeshift cage, police said.
The 6-year-old showed officers how his parents would use an overturned crib and place it over a mattress on the floor with the 2-year-old inside, according to the arrest report.
Police said the crib, which was inside the parents’ bedroom closet, had exposed metal springs from being turned upside down, instead of holding a mattress when used properly.
The children were removed from the home and placed in the custody of the Department of Children and Families, police said.
As the children were leaving, the 6-year-old said, “I didn’t want anyone to get in trouble. I just didn’t want to be in the cage,” according to the arrest report.
Both parents were taken into custody and charged with two counts of aggravated child abuse and one count of child neglect, according to the arrest report.
On Dec. 11, they were placed on administrative leave from the University of Florida, where they had been working as biological scientists for a number of years, a spokesperson for the university told McClatchy News in an email.
The children’s mother works in the Plant Pathology Department, and their father works for the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Horticultural Sciences Department, according to deleted pages on the university’s website, WCJB reported.
Gainesville is about 115 miles northwest of Orlando.
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