After COVID ‘lockdown’ regulations ceased, three youngsters were allegedly discovered living in conditions like to those of a prison.
After reportedly keeping their three children indoors and making them follow pandemic regulations, such donning masks, for the previous four years, a German couple in Spain was arrested.
The twins, who are eight years old, and a 10-year-old were miraculously freed from the ‘house of horrors’ in Oviedo on Monday, April 28, after being imprisoned there since about December 2021.
After releasing the kids, police saw that they behaved strangely for being outside, touching the grass and seeming interested in a snail.
“As soon as we got them out, all three children began to breathe deeply, as if they had never been outside before,” an investigator claimed, as reported by the New York Post.
According to El Comercio, a neighbor complained to the authorities on April 14 that the children had not been going to school, which is how the authorities found out about their predicament.
Police were concerned after surveillance on the house showed that the 53-year-old father was the only one leaving to get the mail and groceries, even though Oviedo Police Chief Javier Lozano claimed there was nothing “initially” that raised concerns.
The rest of the family hasn’t left the house since December 2021, according to other neighbors.
El Mundo reports that when police arrived at the scene, the father ‘consented’ to let them in while they saw the mother, a 48-year-old German-American, masking the children with three masks apiece.
She reportedly warned authorities to “be careful” since her kids were “very sick.”
The gravity of the children’s predicament was only apparent from the inside, when they discovered a “clearly unsanitary situation” with the house cluttered with significant amounts of medication and masks, as well as garbage.
José Ramón Prado, a councilor for citizen security, went on to describe it as a “pathogenic environment.”
Despite their age, the kids also had “defaced monsters and dolls” and slept in cribs.
Later, it was discovered that the kids didn’t seem to have any ailments.
Lozano dubbed the property a ‘house of horrors’ during a press conference while another agent told El Mundo, “The children were in terrible shape. It was absolutely outrageous. Not malnourished, because they were fed. But they were also dirty… [and] completely cut off from reality, and not just because they didn’t go to school.”
The representative continued, “When we took them out of the house, into the garden, where they wouldn’t even go outside, they saw a snail and went crazy, freaked out.”
Since then, the parents have been kept in pretrial jail without bail, and the children have been placed in a juvenile center.
According to ABC, the Oviedo Police Department has detained and accused the pair, who are allegedly suffering from “COVID syndrome,” with domestic assault, frequent psychological abuse, and child abandonment.
Lozano continued, “We’ve all been affected by Covid syndrome and what the pandemic has brought, and we can speculate about what led a family to live locked up for so long.”
