Police released the body camera footage and 911 call in connection with the case of a Connecticut man who told officers he started a fire in order to escape the small room he had been locked away in by his stepmother 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, 56-year-old Kimberly Sullivan, called authorities about the fire that night.
“Please hurry,” she is heard saying to 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 if she sees flames or smoke, she said “Yes.”
“We need an ambulance, please, please we need an ambulance,” Sullivan said.
The dispatcher asks why the ambulance is needed and if her stepson is injured.
“Yes, his room, the TV in his room!” the woman says. “Yes, he’s injured, please send an ambulance!”
When 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 footage starts at around 8:50 p.m., with an officer walking up to the home where he finds Sullivan standing in front of it, 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 that she was assisting a first responder to get him out of the house.
She is then escorted by the officer away from the home for her safety. Behind her, a firefighter appears to be carrying another person who was in the home. The individual’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 against her 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 he was only let out in the mornings for 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.
The 32-year-old told an officer that he set the fire using a lighter, hand sanitizer and paper.
“I wanted my freedom,” he said, according to the affidavit.
Speaking to reporters last week, Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo said: “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 on 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.
