Yenier Conde and Sarah Conde: Lansing, Michigan parents charged with child abuse and unlawful punishment after locking their 5 children in dungeon style room during 6 year period with whippings & starving.
A Lansing, Michigan couple have been charged after their five children were punished with whippings and confined in a dark, locked room described by cops as a ‘dungeon’.
Booked last week with child abuse and unlawful imprisonment was 32 year old man, Yenier Conde and Sarah Conde, 28, following the husband and wife’s arrest last year upon abuse the couple imparted on their children over six years, beginning in 2011.
The Lansing State Journal reported the couple’s five children, including one with cancer being kept in the bedroom without food or water. According to an arrest report, upon locking the children into the room, the parents then bolted the door tight.
The abuse went on for a period of six years and was only discovered in 2017. During their time in the ‘dungeon’ the children, ranging in ages from six to eleven, were deprived of light and made to go to the bathroom in the room along with being deprived food and water. So merciless was their treatment, the parents are alleged to have beaten the children and threatened them with guns.
According to one of the boys, the siblings would be forced in the dungeon style room for anywhere up to 10 hours up to 2 days.
Investigators said they searched the residence and found a boarded-up window, holes in the wall and an open vent that connected the bedrooms. It would be locked from the outside, they said. One of the siblings, a 6-year-old claimed having to go to the bathroom inside the closet.
So egregious was the the children’s mistreatment, police told of Yenier and Sarah Code also refusing to allow the children medical care. One child afflicted with cancer was not allowed to continue to see their cancer doctor.
In one instance, after the children flooded the home’s bathroom, Sarah Conde lined them up and aimed a loaded gun at them, according to her oldest son.
‘She almost shot us. She made us stand in a line. She was laughing with her gun. She was about to shoot us,’ the boy told investigators. ‘She said, ‘Stand in a line so that the blood can spill on (the oldest boy) and then (he) can come up front and I can shoot him.”
Yenier and Sarah Conde: Investigated by CPS (12 times) since 2009 but somehow managed to retain custody of children until 2017.
Of disconcert, Child Protection Services were called on the family at least 12 times since April 2009 before the children were removed from the Condes’ custody last year and placed in foster care. The couple has since lost custody.
The Condes were each charged with 10 counts of first and second degree child abuse and unlawful imprisonment following last Friday’s court appearance.
Sarah Conde has an Aug. 3 hearing. Her attorney declined to comment on the charges.
Court records didn’t list a lawyer or court hearings for Yenier Conde.
Update: Friday, police told News 10 that the father, Yenier Conde, was taken into custody.
The Lancing incident mirrors in similar parallel the saga involving California’s David and Louise Turpin‘s thirteen children who were also over a number of years subjected to house of horrors detention and egregious mistreatment, including being chained to the wall and bed posts. The parent’s both face extensive felony child abuse charges following their arrest in the beginning of the year.
