Ten children from the same family were found living in miserable conditions in a house in California, where their parents were physically and psychologically abusing them, the authorities announced on Wednesday.
Ina Rogers, 30, and her husband Jonathan Allen, 29, were arrested March 31 at his home in Fairfield, north of San Francisco, after police answered a call for a missing child.
When they entered the house, the police found the children - aged four months to 12 years - curled up next to each other on the living room floor. The house was in a miserable condition with rubbish, rotten food and feces of people and animals scattered everywhere.
The Solano County Sheriff's Office said the children sustained bruises, burns, bruises and gunshot wounds. Sharon Henry, the district attorney general, said the children were being tortured for "sadistic reasons."
The children were taken to a safe place and "during the investigation, they described in detail the abuses that took place," the California authorities said. Eight of the children even explained that the abuse started many years ago.
The children's grandmother on their mother's side, Wanda Rogers, told a local television network that she suspected the children were being abused, and described Allen as a "monster". "He would take the baby and slap him and put adhesive tape in his mouth so he would not cry," she told KNTV.
Ina Rogers told reporters that welfare services had interrogated the children three years ago when her mother had "reported something" that prompted the service to visit the home, but the investigation went nowhere.