A Florida couple was accused Thursday of forcing their blind adopted son to guzzle a gallon of water and then locking him in a bedroom without access to a toilet. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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The 16-year-old boy, who is also mentally handicapped and was beaten black and blue, nearly died of septic shock as a result of the alleged water torture, police said.
Investigators removed him and the two adopted teenage girls who were also living in the hellish household when they arrested Ronald and Tammy White.
The couple is charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse with great bodily harm and caging a child.
“We don’t know at this point how long the child was locked into the room,” Hernando County Sheriff’s Corporal Wendy McGinnis said. “Whether it was several hours a day, several days, weeks, we don’t know at this point.”
Police believe Ronald White, 36, inflicted beatings on the boy and regularly forced all three children to drink gallons of water as punishment.
They are less clear about the role his 42-year-old wife played in the alleged abuse of the children, all of whom were adopted within the last three years.
The nightmarish conditions were discovered on July 14 when paramedics were called to the couple’s Spring Hill home and found the boy – sporting a black eye and bruises across his arms, legs and chest – passed out on a bathroom floor.
They raced the stricken teen to a local hospital and later had him airlifted to All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg after his organs started shutting down.
He remains in critical condition.
The Whites hail from tiny Ambrose, Ga., where they racked up nearly $150,000 in debts and twice declared bankruptcy, records show. The most recent filing was in 2008.
In Georgia, people who adopt get up to $486.67 per month for 13- to 18-year-old children, the St. Petersburg Times reported.
While it’s not clear whether the Whites adopted to get out of debt – or whether they continued to receive payments after moving to Florida – their payments would have amounted to $17,520.12 a year, the paper calculated.
