Police released the body camera video and 911 call in connection with the case of a Connecticut man who told officers he started a fire to escape the small room his stepmother had locked him away in for more than two decades.
When they responded to the blaze in the Waterbury home on Feb. 17, officers found the 32-year-old man severely emaciated, having been subjected to “prolonged abuse, starvation, severe neglect and inhumane treatment,” police said in a news release last week.
The man's stepmother, Kimberly Sullivan, 56, called authorities about the fire that night.
“Please hurry,” she is telling a dispatcher, adding, “There's a fire.”
“My son, stepson, he’s in his room, and I don’t know, he did something with the TV,” Sullivan tells the dispatcher.
When she is asked whether she sees flames or smoke, she says, "Yes."
"We need an ambulance, please. Please, we need an ambulance," Sullivan says.
The dispatcher asks why the ambulance is needed and whether if her stepson is injured.
"Yes, his room, the TV in his room!" the woman says. "Yes, he's injured, please send an ambulance!"
Asked what his injuries are, she says, "I don't know."
"He's kind of passed out; he's out of it," she says.
The body camera video starts at around 8:50 p.m., with an officer walking up to the home, where he finds Sullivan standing in front, holding a dog and yelling at someone to "come down."
When an officer asks her who else is in the house, she says, "My stepson is in here," and she says she was assisting a first responder to get him out of the house.
The officer escorts her away from the home for her safety. Behind her, a firefighter appears to be carrying another person who was in the home. The person's face is blurred in the video.
The person, presumably the stepson, is carried into the back of an ambulance before the video ends.
Sullivan was arrested Wednesday and arraigned on charges of assault, kidnapping, unlawful restraint, reckless endangerment and cruelty to persons, according to police. She was held on a $300,000 bond, which she posted the next day.
Sullivan has denied the allegations through an attorney.
Her stepson, who was identified as MV-1 in an affidavit, weighed 68 pounds when officers found him. He is 5-feet-9. He told authorities that he was let out in the mornings for only 15 minutes to two hours to do chores and that he was given two sandwiches a day and the equivalent of two small bottles of water.
He told an officer that he set the fire using a lighter, hand sanitizer and paper, according to the affidavit.
“I wanted my freedom,” he said, according to the affidavit.
Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo told reporters last week, "In 33 years of law enforcement, this is the worst treatment of humanity that I’ve ever witnessed."
Sullivan appeared in Waterbury Superior Court briefly Thursday and declined to make any statements before the judge denied the prosecution’s request to place her under house arrest. She will be allowed to travel within Connecticut but will have to keep in close, regular contact with probation officers.
