He escaped once. In 2005, when he was 12 or 13, he broke off a piece of the door’s center paneling; but rather than fleeing the house, he simply slipped down to the kitchen to scrounge for food. When his breakout was discovered, he told the police, his bedroom door was reinforced with plywood. Threats of withholding food, or violence, kept him from trying again.

#criminal #law #abuse

#GiftArticle link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/nyregion/ct-waterbury-captive.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-E4.SKiQ.LBj5Qy1mwyhW&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“He didn’t get to see a movie. He didn’t get to go to a concert, he didn’t get to fall in love & get his heart broken,” Tessman added. “It kills me.”

Inside his room, which was secured with a slide lock from the outside, the man read & reread a handful of books, he told the police, looking up words he didn’t know in a dictionary. He “ultimately educated himself,” the police affidavit reads.

Pannone was not the only one trying to uncover that secret: For decades, the man’s half sister, Heather Tessman, whom their biological mother had given up for adoption before her son was born, fruitlessly dug through yearbooks of local schools she found online, …hunting for the brother she had met once, when she was 3 yrs old.

“You can’t find a person who doesn’t exist,” Tessman, 35, who lives in Vernon, CT, said in an interview.

Lopes can still picture a too-skinny kid with an infectious smile. The boy was standing on the peeling porch next door, but ventured no further.

“I said, ‘Where have you been?’” Lopes recalled. “I’m home-schooled,” was his answer.

In a warrant for Mrs. Sullivan’s arrest, the man said that his stepmother & his father forbade him to have friends. “I have been kept a secret my entire life,” he told the police.

Frustrated, Pannone tried another way.

He asked for the help of the Lopes family, who lived next door to the Sullivans & whose son, Peter, was then a 10-yr-old Barnard student. Pannone asked Peter & his family to keep an eye on their neighbor.

Peter Lopes, who is now 29, has not lived in the neighborhood since 2009, but said he remembered the last time he saw his classmate…shortly after the boy was pulled out of Barnard.

But the child was still always hungry and disheveled. Over the five years the boy attended Barnard Elementary, Mr. Pannone said he made call after call to the Department of Children and Families. Each time, he said, they would investigate and report back that the child was fine.

“You knew something was not right,” Mr. Pannone said in a recent interview. “He appeared to be a happy-go-lucky kid, but we knew that something was amiss.”

Tom Pannone, who was a principal at Barnard Elementary School, says he can remember the uneasy feeling he had about the child enrolled at his school in 2001. The boy arrived daily with a dirty plastic lunchbox; at least once, Pannone found him in a bathroom before school started, devouring his packed lunch. It was there that he saw the boy standing at a urinal, drinking the water as he flushed. Mr. Pannone called the boy’s stepmother, he said, & the behavior stopped.

“She is adamant that she had done nothing wrong,” her lawyer, Ioannis Kaloidis, said in an interview . Kaloidis laid blame on the biological father, #KreggSullivan, who died in January of last year [do she kept it up for over a year after the father’s death. Sure, she’s totes blameless ]. (The biological mother had given up her parental rights to Sullivan, to whom she was briefly married.)

Late last month, the man’s stepmother, #KimberlySullivan, 57, was arraigned in Waterbury Superior Court. She has been charged w/ #kidnapping, #assault, #cruelty, unlawful #restraint & reckless #endangerment. If convicted of all charges, she could serve the rest of her life in prison.…She pleaded not guilty.

That year, his son was pulled from school, purportedly for *#HomeSchooling. In interviews w/police officers last month, the man told them that for a brief time he received school work sheets, but all formal education stopped shortly after. The next time he left his home, 20 years later, it was in the arms of the firefighter.

“He looked,” said Detective Steve Brownell of the Waterbury PD, who interviewed him later at the hospital, “like a Holocaust survivor.”

But many in the community had feared for the boy’s safety for a long time.

For years before the man’s disappearance, his teachers, classmates, neighbors & his elementary school principal all believed he was suffering silently. They repeatedly called the Waterbury #Police & the #Connecticut Dept of #Children & Families [#DCF] to intercede for a child they said was so hungry that he ate from the trash & stole his classmates’ food.

The revelations that began in that ambulance ride on Feb 17 cracked wide one of the most shocking secrets to ever tarnish Waterbury, a small, former manufacturing city in the southern part of Connecticut. The police now believe what the man said in the ambulance that evening: For the past 20 yrs, an 8X9’ room on the top floor of a disheveled house at 2 Blake Street was a prison cell for a boy — now a man — last been seen by the outside world when he was in the 4th grade.

The ride in the ambulance, he said, was the first time he had been let out of the house since he was 12.

Then, he made a confession. He was the one who set the fire. He used a lighter forgotten in the pocket of an old jacket that his stepmother had given him. If he did not die in the fire, he had reasoned, he might finally be set free.