A North Carolina couple allegedly tormented their six children – including keeping one child in a feces-filled dog kennel inside their “filthy” house, authorities said last week.
Parents Lacy Douglas Hocutt Jr., 34, and Rachel Leigh Galasso, 33, were arrested Wednesday for subjecting the victims, ages one to 15, to sickening conditions, the Wake County Prosecutor’s Office said, according to reports.
The six children were removed from the home in mid-February, each suffering from health problems, according to prosecutors, WRAL reported.
A teen girl’s scoliosis went untreated so long that surgery cannot fix the condition and she will instead suffer from it “for the remainder of her life,” according to court docs obtained by the News and Observer.
Two children’s dental care was in such bad shape that they needed to have their adult teeth pulled and “cannot chew without pain” while a 13-year-old boy was imprisoned in a dog cage and “found covered in feces,” prosecutors alleged, according to reports.
His weight was so low that it was “life-threatening.”
“He now rocks back and forth, and all he yells is, ‘You’re never getting out. You’re never getting out,’ which we can only assume is what was screamed at him while he was in there,” an assistant district attorney said in court Thursday, according to WRAL.
Hocutt allegedly raped one of the children for at least four years, dating back to as early as October 2017, according to an arrest warrant obtained by the News and Observer.
He is facing three counts of statutory rape of a child 15 or younger and six more counts of statutory rape of a child by an adult.
Galasso is charged with two counts of negligent child abuse resulting in serious bodily injury and two counts of negligent child abuse resulting in serious physical injury, according to the News and Observer.
When Child Protective Services and the sheriff’s office reached the home, it was “so filthy that investigators had to wear protective gear,” the prosecutor said, according to WRAL.
The six kids also couldn’t read or write because they did not attend school, prosecutors said.
Hocutt and Galasso were arrested inside a Raleigh motel on Wednesday.