Among the bad, they have experienced the best. This is the feeling conveyed this morning, after the sentence was announced, by the lawyers of the couple tried in Oviedo for keeping their children confined for three and a half years in a remote chalet dubbed “the house of horrors.”
The parents – a 53-year-old German man and his wife, American but also with a German passport, 48 years old – faced a 25-year prison sentence, but the sentence handed down by the Oviedo Court has been much more lenient.
The court did not find illegal detention in the long confinement of those children, aged between 8 and 10 years. This is what the prosecutor requested to support that high sentence demand.
The judges of that Court do find that there was “habitual psychological violence within the family environment.” The punishment imposed for this crime is a sentence of 2.4 years in prison for each parent. To which another 6 months must be added for a crime of family abandonment. In total: 2 years and 10 months in prison.
Those parents will have to wait, on the other hand, to see their children again, now under the care of the Administration. Since they have been imprisoned, they have requested several times, without success, to be able to meet with them. They have always been denied.
The sentence establishes disqualification from exercising parental authority and prohibits contact between those parents and their children
The sentence, which is not final, establishes special disqualification from exercising parental authority, guardianship, curatorship, custody, and foster care for three years and four months, and the prohibition to approach those minors to less than 300 meters from their home, place of study, or any other place they frequent during that time. As civil liability, they must compensate each of the three minors with 30,000 euros.
The defense lawyers have already expressed moderate satisfaction with this ruling, which comes two months after the trial was held. “Of the bad, it is the least bad that could happen to them,” they say. Now they have to calmly analyze this ruling to decide whether to appeal or not.
The defenses requested acquittal arguing that those parents acted under a situation of “irresistible fear” being convinced that their three children – it was the time of covid – could catch that virus if they moved freely on the street. So they decided to lock them up in that chalet on the outskirts of Oviedo from December 2021 until April 2025.
The children were forced to sleep in cribs, despite no longer being the right age, and to always wear diapers and masks
The couple has always maintained that everything they did was for the good of their children. But although illegal detention could not be proven, the court did rule that the way chosen for “that protection” was continuous psychological abuse of the minors.
They were forced to sleep in cribs, despite no longer being the right age for it, and to wear diapers all day, which caused them, when rescued, problems with sphincter control. They also had to wear masks in that “house of horrors” practically all day long.
Also read
The alert was raised by a neighbor. It was believed that only the father lived in that house. When he rented the chalet, he did not notify anyone that he was going to live there with his wife and children, who were not enrolled in school during all those years.
That complaint – the neighbor guessed behind the curtains silhouettes of children, whom she never saw in the garden – led the Local Police to the house. Upon entering, they found a reality that those officers said they had never seen before in their work. Lots of dirt, piles of medication, closed blinds, and children with difficulties speaking normally or moving in open spaces.
