vnquetoi

A couple in Newark, Del., has been arrested for allegedly locking a 12-year-old boy in a bare room for three months.

Police say the child's father, 42-year-old Robert Hohn, and stepmother, 39-year-old Shannon Watterson, kept the child in a room containing nothing but a lamp with no lampshade.

Investigators found the window screwed shut and the door handle installed backwards, NBC 10 reports. The couple allegedly let the boy out only briefly to use the bathroom and eat very small meals.

Melissa Ferraro-Walsh told the station that she found the child on her doorstep Tuesday night, after he managed to escape from the room and run, barefoot, to her house for help.

The woman lives a mile away from the home where the boy was being kept.

"He was so tiny you wouldn't even be able to tell his age," she said. Investigators say Hohn and Watterson restricted their son's food intake, and that he was 20 pounds underweight.

After the woman prepared some food for the child, "he ate and ate and ate for four hours and you could tell that he was just ravenous," she told WPVI....

...
Hohn and Watterson were arrested Wednesday and charged with felony child abuse and four counts of endangering the welfare of a child.