That being said, the adult siblings’ attorney Jack Osborn told reporters after court that none of his clients objected to their parents’ sentence, saying, “They understand there are consequences.”
Yet it’s possible that the conditions police found the Turpins in could still be their life if Jordan hadn’t decided that Jan. 14, 2018, was the day she was going to crawl out the window in the dark, clutching an old cell phone, and call for help, her pre-dawn movements blurrily captured by a security camera across the street.
“I just ran away from home,” she told the 911 dispatcher at the time. “And we have abusing parents.” Asked how they were abusive, Jordan said, “They hit us. They like to throw us across the room. They pull out our hair. They yank out our hair. My two little sisters right now are chained up.” She didn’t know what street she lived on or her home address.
“I’ve never been out,” she explained. She walked toward a stop sign to find a street name, terrified she’d be found out. While Jordan walked she talked, telling the dispatcher sometimes she couldn’t breathe in her house because it—and she and her siblings—were so dirty. Her last bath was “almost a year ago.” She had never seen a gun, but she had heard her parents talking about having one.
About an hour and a half later, sheriff’s deputies arrived at the family’s house on Muir Woods Road to perform a welfare check and within 30 minutes David and Louise were in custody—and everyone who supposedly knew the Turpins couldn’t believe it. The neighbors living in plain view of the house but who didn’t know the family at all were pained that something like this was occurring right in their midst.
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