One evening last week, a barefoot teenage girl with a shaved head burst into her next-door neighbor’s home in Blackwood, N.J., sat down on the couch and began to spill out a harrowing story.
She said her stepfather and mother had imprisoned her at their home for the past seven years, ever since they pulled her out of elementary school with the excuse that she would be home-schooled. She said they locked her in a dog crate for an entire year, and at one point had chained her up in a bathroom. She said her stepfather had sexually abused her.
This week, following a police investigation, prosecutors in Camden County, in South Jersey just outside Philadelphia, announced several charges against her mother, Brenda Spencer, 38, and stepfather, Branndon Mosely, 41. They included assault, criminal restraint, kidnapping and weapons offenses; Mr. Mosely also faces numerous counts of sexual assault.
“The investigation has corroborated the heinous acts endured by the victim and we will hold those responsible accountable,” Lt. Andy McNeil, a spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said in an interview. Authorities did not identify the 18-year-old teenager.
Mr. Mosely is a rail conductor for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, the transit system that serves the Philadelphia region, and Ms. Spencer is a dog handler who specializes in Great Danes, the authorities said. They are being held in jail while they await a detention hearing scheduled for next week. Lawyers for the couple declined to comment.
Days after the distressed teenage girl barreled into the home where he was staying, Michael Lacey, a 36-year-old pool cleaner, said he kept breaking down in tears over the brutality she had described.
She recounted to Mr. Lacey how an alarm system was rigged so she could not escape. How her mother shaved her head as punishment and how she was forced to relieve herself in a bucket. And she explained to Mr. Lacey that it all happened behind closed doors just 20 yards away from the house he was staying in, which belonged to his mother.
“After I found out that everything she was telling me was true, I broke down,” Mr. Lacey said in an interview. “I wish I had known. I wish I had known.”
The region has recently been shaken by an eerily similar episode in which a 32-year-old Connecticut man escaped from what he said was 20 years of imprisonment by his late father and stepmother. He lit a fire in his room, forcing firefighters to rescue him from his family’s burning home, the authorities have said. His stepmother faces multiple charges relating to his confinement.
The scene in Blackwood, where the teenager is believed to have been held, is “one of the most despicable cases we’ve run across,” Chief David Harkins of the Gloucester Township Police Department said at a news conference on Wednesday. Officials also took aim at home-schooling, an increasingly popular and barely regulated alternative to traditional schooling. Taking the girl out of school “helped hide the heinous, yearslong torture,” Grace C. MacAulay the Camden County prosecutor said.
When the police entered the home, they found squalid conditions, Ms. MacAulay said, as well as a room rigged with an alarm system, the bucket the girl said she had been forced to use and the chains she said had bound her.
Mr. Mosely and Ms. Spencer took the teenager’s 13-year-old sister out of school after second grade in an effort to conceal her sibling’s abuse, according to a criminal complaint. “They were afraid she would tell someone that the victim was living in a dog crate,” the document reads. The charges against the couple relate only to the older sister; officials said an investigation was continuing into whether there were other victims.
According to their Facebook accounts, Mr. Mosely and Ms. Spencer have three other children together: a 3-year-old boy and twin 5-year-old girls. Officials said that only the two teenage sisters were found in the home, and were unable to provide information about any other children.
A large number of animals were also removed from the home, including four Great Danes, three other dogs, a lizard, snakes, several birds, two hamsters and 29 chinchillas, according to Chief Harkins. Ms. Spencer’s social media is filled with love notes to Mr. Mosely, interspersed with images of her in sundresses posing with Great Danes at dog competitions.
The family appears to have lived at their house on Ridge Avenue since 2017, according to property records. Since then, the only police calls to the home have been for barking dogs in the yard. But whenever the police arrived, Chief Harkins said, the couple quickly put the dogs inside.
No responding officers ever entered the house.
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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