The 16-year-old twins who managed to escape their mother’s home in Cypress, Texas, have detailed the horrific abuse they endured in newly-obtained court documents. Zaikiya Duncan and her boyfriend, Jova Terrell, were arrested on Tuesday and are facing a heap of child abuse charges after her twins— whose identities have been redacted — pled for help from neighbors after fleeing from their abusive household.
KHOU 11 obtained the documents, where the boy and girl revealed how Duncan — a mother of seven children — would regularly pour bleach in their mouths and on their private parts until it burned while forcing them to drink cleaning products if she felt they had “talked too much.” The teens said they were given Benadryl tablets until one of them suffered a seizure, with Duncan often using extension cords and curtain rods to violently beat her children.
Her kids were also said to have survived on bologna sandwiches with mustard, which was served only a few times a week, and made her offsprings defecate on themselves before instructing them to use a dirty mop to clean themselves. Duncan, who fled to Louisiana with Terrell and her five other children, was arrested earlier this week, with a Louisiana judge having ordered for both adults to be extradited back to the Houston area within 30 days.
One of the neighbors who called the police after speaking to the distraught teens last month has told ABC13 that the pair appeared hungry as they recounted the horrific abuse they faced by their mother and her boyfriend. “The girl was saying, ‘This is what’s going on,’ and the boy was just, all he could think about was food. They sat down, both of them said they were hungry. They started eating and saying how they moved from Baton Rouge to here,” the neighbor expressed.
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To make matters worse, Duncan’s background shows that she had run-ins with the law in the past, including a child abuse incident in Louisiana back in 2012. At the time, she was said to have used hot water on one of her then-five-year children which left the child with noticeable burns.
The home she had been staying in with her boyfriend is said to have been a $600,000 house which they had only been living in for two weeks before the teens’ escape and call for help from neighbors. The case remains ongoing.