A Utah couple is in jail after police found their 13-year-old son locked in an alcove under the stairs in their home, and they say they’d do it again because they’re nothing wrong with it.
Travis Peterson, 49, and Melissa Gray, 42, were arrested Tueday and charged with aggravated child abuse, KSTU reported. Gray, the boy’s stepmother, faces an additional charge of child abuse with injury.
Unified Police did not say who called them to the home in Kearns, but the found the boy in the makeshift cell under the stairs with padlocked gatese. The boy further said that he had previously been locked in a cell made out of a loft bed “for months” and was only allowed out to go to the bathroom.
“[The victim] talked about a time when [they were] desperate to get out of the cell to use the restroom,” a police affidavit states, according to KTVX. “[The victim] was able to break out of the cell and use the bathroom because no one was responding to [their] pleas to get out.”
The boy said he was hungry and lonely and had been in the cell under the stairs for 24 hours, forced to sleep curled on the floor, police said.
Peterson and Gray said they saw no problems with locking a child into a makeshift cell. Gray told investigators she wanted the boy “to see what it was like in a city and the real world,” the arrest report said. The parents further told investigators that if the child is returned to their home, he would go back in the cell because there’s nothing wrong with it.
“Keeping [kids] behind makeshift cells is not the way children should be raised,” said Unified Police Sgt. Aymee Race, according to KSTU.
But Peterson told police he worked in the health care industry and was worried he’d lose his job since “the nation and world is cracking down on this sort of thing.”
Investigators also learned that the boy’s 22-year-old brother had also been locked up when he was a boy and forced to defecate in a dresser drawer.
The teen is now staying with relatives while police and the Utah Division of Child and Family Services investigate.
Peterson and Gray are being held without bail.
