US: Father kept family imprisoned in rat-infested caravan

A man held his family captive for three years in such squalor that police had to wear gas masks when they broke in to rescue them.

One officer refused to enter the American family’s caravan which had thousands of cockroaches and other bugs crawling through drawers, cupboards and furniture.

Rotten food littered the place and a long-ignored plumbing problem left the floors rotten and mattresses mouldy.

Police said Raymond Daniel Thurmond forced his wife and four children to live in the caravan in northern Georgia, allowing them to leave only once in three years.

Even then it was only for a two-hour Easter visit to his wife’s parents’ home in North Carolina.

“It was pretty much a virtual prison,” Lavonia Police spokeswoman Missy Collins said. “He controlled what they ate, what they did. He controlled pretty much everything.”

Thurmond is being held charges of rape, child abuse and false imprisonment.

The family moved to the mobile home park in August 2005 after Thurmond got a job at a nearby poultry factory. Neighbours described him as polite and quiet, although the park manager said the family was almost evicted because of late rent.

He had no police record, and at one point enrolled his eldest child in school.

Behind closed doors, however, police say Thurmond ruled the family with an iron fist, beating his children ages 14, 13, 12 and nine with a steel-toed boot.

The children told police they would sometimes hear their father attacking and raping their mother in a bedroom.

People in the town are wondering why it took so long to discover the dire situation – and why Thurmond’s wife and children did not leave.

Lavonia Police Chief Bruce Carlisle said his officers found evidence that Thurmond may have locked the bedroom doors while he was at work each day, but he suggested Thurmond’s wife may also have suffered from “battered wife’s syndrome".

“The victims of this type of abuse, they’re made to believe they’re not worthy of anything, that this is what they deserve,” he said. “It’s amazing. They were not allowed outside. They were simply not allowed to go near the door. It all goes back to the control thing.”

Police are awaiting the results of psychological tests to decide whether to charge Thurmond’s wife, but said she seemed to have slowly fallen under her husband’s control.

Thurmond’s wife finally contacted police after he told her he was leaving her for another woman and that he would return every few days with food.

The children, who are underweight and malnourished, are in government custody, and investigators describe them as shy, but not completely socially undeveloped. None went to school except for the oldest for a short time.