In horror movies, you often see bizarre things and think, “That can’t happen.” Well, it can. And it does.
In a quiet suburb of the United States, a fire broke out. As usual, firefighters, paramedics, and police arrived. The house was burning, and all the windows were nailed shut from the inside. But they broke down the doors and started to put out the flames, and what they found was beyond belief.
In one of the rooms, they discovered a cage with what could only be described as a “zombie.” A skeletal man, with unhealthy skin color and a mouth full of decaying teeth. They weighed him later—just 29 kilograms.
And this was a 32-year-old man.
It turned out his stepmother had kept him locked in a cage since he was 11 years old. He had been imprisoned for more than 20 years, living like an animal. He had no access to a bathroom, so he relieved himself in the cage, barely got any food, and only had two cups of water a day.
The stepmother, 56-year-old Kimberly Sullivan, had tormented her stepson since childhood. She refused to feed him, forcing him to beg for food from neighbors, steal, and even rummage through garbage bins. Eventually, she stopped allowing him to go to school, locked him in a closet, and then put him in the cage. Sometimes, she would let him out for a couple of hours a day, but soon after, she started keeping him locked up constantly.
To finally gain his freedom, the poor man had to set the fire when his stepmother wasn’t home.