Malnourished, handcuffed and scared: How teenage twins escaped their own home to spark amber alert
The twins’ mother, Zaikiya Duncan, 40, was arrested on 18 October with her boyfriend and charged with child abuse
The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
Grainy footage from Houston-area Ring cameras captured the moment that a pair of “malnourished” twins made a daring escape from their house of horrors home – a place where they were reportedly kept in handcuffs and forced to suffer through indescribable forms of abuse, all allegedly at the hands of their own mother.
Cameras from their Cypress neighbours’ doors trace the teens’ furtive movements in the early morning on 18 October, as the brother and sister, 16, can be seen darting up to doorsteps begging for someone, anyone, to help.
Eventually, after 30 minutes of rejections, the pair were welcomed indoors by a single mother at approximately 5.30am. Once inside, the woman, who has asked not to be identified, realised that the two hollowed out figures who’d been begging on her doorstep had a much graver story to tell.
They began describing how they’d managed to flee their home, handcuffs still attached around their weathered and bruised wrists, but their five other siblings were still stuck in the home where they claimed they’d been subjected to an appalling regime of abuse.
Their abuser, they alleged, was their 40-year-old mother, Zaikiya Duncan, and her accomplice was her boyfriend, 27-year-old Jova Terrell.
After being able to make a 911 call from the neighbour’s home, the twins began to unravel a series of allegations against Ms Duncan, including one where they claimed that they “had been handcuffed and held against their will by their mom.”
“It was obvious to us and the fire department that the children were in distress. They had marks on their wrists, pretty deep marks from the handcuffs. They were bruised and malnourished in our eyes,” said Jeff McShan, the spokesman for Harris County Constable Precinct 5, in an interview with NBC.
Standing in their way between making a possible arrest and getting the other five children to safety, however, was the issue of finding the actual home where the teens alleged they’d been held captive.
The twins informed police that they’d only just moved to the neighbourhood, and they didn’t actually know the address of their home, or how to locate it, because they hadn’t been let outside.
It would take authorities hours, Mr McShan noted, to eventually knock on the correct door where Ms Duncan and the five other children had been living. But by the time they’d made it, she, Mr Terrell and the rest of her kin had left without a trace.
On 18 October, one day after the pair of teens had escaped, authorities issued an Amber Alert for the remaining children and the couple, posting pictures to their social media pages that said they suspect the pair to be driving a car with a Rick and Morty bumper sticker on the back.
Just a few hours after that alert was sent Harris County Constable Precinct 5 posted a message that confirmed the couple had been arrested in Baton Rouge – nearly 300 miles east of their Houston neighbourhood – after the pair had been stopped at a routine traffic stop.
Since the arrest, more details have emerged about Ms Duncan’s past instances of alleged child abuse, with some cases resulting in her young children being removed from her house for a period.
How did the abuse get discovered?
In the early hours of 18 October, 16-year-old twins, who have not been identified by authorities, escaped from their mother’s Houston-area home and slipped into the night.
While the pair scurried across lawns in the Cypress neighbourhood, which they told police they’d only just recently moved to, multiple Ring cameras from nearby homes captured their movements as they set up to the front doorways to beg for help.
“Please can you let us in?” one of the children can be heard saying in a near-whisper in one of the clips, shared with KHOU. “We just need somewhere to be right now,” the girl, in a black hoodie can be heard answering after one of the neighbours asks through an intercom what happened.
The pair would spend the next 30 minutes going door-to-door asking for assistance, unable to condense the horrors they’d been subjected to into a concise elevator pitch.
As the temperatures dropped into the low 50s, they managed to get the reception they’d been hoping for from a single mother, home with her young child, at about 5.30am.
Once inside, the woman quickly provided the shirtless boy with a blanket to warm up and made the visibly malnourished children with some food.
“I sat them down, brought them some blankets, covered them up, and I think the first thing the little boy said was, ‘we’re starving,” she said in an interview with KHOU. The “visibly shaking” teen girl began to explain how the handcuffs she was holding were the ones she’d just broken out of.
The pair then went on to claim that their mother had kept them in the laundry room, where they were forced to sleep naked while being zip-tied at the ankles and handcuffed at the wrists. When they needed to relieve themselves, she said, they were forced to do so on themselves.
How did the couple get arrested?
Once 911 was called and arrived at the woman’s house, they set about trying to find the home where the twins had alleged this abusive behaviour had been carried out.
Unfortunately, since the twins had just relocated to the Houston-area neighbourhood and they hadn’t been let outside, they were unable to provide the address. It would then take authorities several hours before they were able to track down the family home where Ms Duncan had recently moved, but once there, she, her boyfriend and the remaining five children were gone.
On the night of 18 October, after the pair of eldest twins had successfully escaped from their family home in the Houston-area, the other children and their mother and her boyfriend drove across state lines, forcing authorities to issue an Amber Alert.
“Biological Mom Zaikiya Duncan and her boyfriend Jova Terrell are in the process of being charged with Injury to a Child (1st Degree Felony),” the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable’s Office said in a Facebook post. “They are currently on the run with 5 of her children and they need to be located. An Amber Alert has been issued.”
About two hours after issuing that alert, the precinct provided another update, indicating that they’d received reports that the children had been dropped off at a relative’s house.
Louisiana State Police then were able to track down the 40-year-old and her 27-year-old boyfriend after the pair had been stopped at a traffic stop in Baton Rouge, about a five-hour drive away from their home in Texas.
Both have been charged with two counts of felony injury to a child and were set to be brought back to Houston last week, a spokesperson confirmed to ABC 13.
Ms Duncan was facing an extradition hearing on 20 October, the news outlet reported, and Duncan is listed as being an inmate on a charge of being a fugitive at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. Terrell was not listed as an inmate there.
What’s going to happen to the children?
A couple hours after that last update on the night of 18 October, the Amber Alert was dropped as police had tracked down the couple in Baton Rouge and arrested them. One child was with the couple, while the remaining four, they confirmed, had been dropped off at the home of a relative.
All seven children, which include the 16-year-old twins, a seven-year-old, a 10-year-old, 12-year-old twin boys and a 14-year-old, have been turned over to child protective services.
The twins were hospitalised, and it has not been reported if the pair have been released yet.
The force is also on the lookout for another child, an 18-year-old sibling of the seven other children who were turned over to child protective services. His whereabouts were unclear as of 19 October, NBC reported.
The mother’s past history
The grim discoveries unveiled to the public last week are, disturbingly, not the first time that Duncan has had run-ins with the law over her mistreatment of her kin.
Records going back 10 years reportedly trace a pattern of abuse, one that resulted in two of her children being surrendered to child protective services. Those kids would later be returned to the now 40-year-old mother.
In 2012, Duncan’s then five-year-old daughter was brought to hospital from school after it was revealed that she was suffering from what appeared to be serious burns.
Doctors at the hospital, KHOU reported, determined that those burn marks, which spread out across her feet, parts of her torso and genitals, were likely caused by hot water.
Duncan’s other son, who had also been brought to the hospital, was determined to have bruising along his back, hip, torso and buttocks.
This hospital visit then tipped off police to go to Ms Duncan’s home, where they found her infant child – only 20-months-old at the time – alone with just her four-year-old sibling to supervise.
The baby, KHOU reported, was nested in clothing with his hands bound.
After this disturbing discovery, police reported that Ms Duncan would go on to admit even more instances of abusive parenting. One child, she reportedly told them, would be punished for an hour at a time by being forced to lie on his forearms in a push-up position till his hands began to swell.
That same child, court documents said, was forced to sleep inside a closet in the family home, where he would reportedly be boarded up at night so as to keep him from, as Duncan said, sneaking into the kitchen at night to “steal food”.
Two of the Duncan’s children during that episode were removed from the home, due to showing signs of abuse, but they were later returned to her care even after she’d been charged with cruelty to juveniles and had admitted to past instances of being investigated for child abuse.