A young man emerged from a burning house after decades of alleged captivity. His city is now reckoning with the fallout

Waterbury, Connecticut (CNN) — “It’s just enough already,” a woman says, standing in front of her neatly trimmed home. She shakes her head and gestures toward the line of news vans parked outside 2 Blake Street before abandoning her gardening tools in the front yard and retreating into the house.

2 Blake Street – or Waterbury’s “house of horrors,” as it’s been branded by some – has captured the nation’s interest since a 32-year-old man lit a fire there last month to escape the place where police say he endured more than 20 years of captivity, abuse and starvation at the hands of his stepmother.

On the other end of Blake Street, 39-year-old Marvin McCullough is more obliging to the brigade of journalists parked outside his home. He’s talked to a few about the seemingly normal family that lived in the worn, two-story white house with pale blue details facing his: They mostly kept to themselves, filing in and out over the years – the stepmother, her late husband, her two daughters, their friends.

McCullough never saw signs another person was living there, he says – let alone being held captive, as police and court documents assert.

This is a quiet neighborhood, he continues – at least it used to be. McCullough says he last saw the stepmother the day after the fire, when she told him, “I just want to get out of here.” When detectives were still hanging around the house a week later, he realized there was more to it.

Since 57-year-old Kimberly Sullivan’s arrest this month on charges including kidnapping, assault and cruelty, McCullough says he’s seen more traffic up and down his street than in the eight years he’s lived here. People want to see the house from the headlines up close.

Sullivan is set to be arraigned Wednesday, and her lawyers have said they plan to enter not guilty pleas on her behalf. Sullivan “maintains her innocence,” one attorney has said, adding the allegations against her are “absolutely not true.”

Still, the leaders of this small city between Hartford and New York are contending with a hunger for accountability from residents who see the tragedy as a failure to protect one of their own. And when the spectators and news vans pull out of Blake Street every evening, people here are left to reckon with the allegations of abuse that unfolded behind closed doors in the now-boarded-up house overlooking Chase Park.

Neighbors, faith leaders, the mayor – they all have memories of that park: playing tennis, walking their dogs, marveling up at the fireworks in the distance on the Fourth of July. So much life happened there – a whole world waiting on the other side of the street, just out of reach.

‘I couldn’t even sleep that night’

The 32-year-old survivor’s last reported connection to this world was just half a mile from his house, at Barnard Elementary School. The aging brick schoolhouse on Draher Street is now an adult education center that still bears the grade school’s name.

Former Barnard Principal Tom Pannone and his team called the Connecticut Department of Children and Families at least 20 times years ago with concerns about the well-being of their then-student, he told NBC Connecticut.

The agency has “looked extensively” at its databases and not found any records related to the family, it told CNN, adding its policy is to expunge records five years after completing an investigation, “provided there are no other substantiated reports.”

Brendalis Medina, 31, a former student at Barnard Elementary, remembers sitting in fourth grade class next to a young boy who appeared to be struggling, she says. He often seemed hungry and would ask the other kids for food.

Her seatmate was timid and small – even for his age – she says. He was pale, with yellowed teeth and dirty clothes that didn’t quite fit him, and he sometimes spoke with a stutter.

“Some kids would make fun of him because he was different, he looked different,” she recalls.

When she heard recently about the harrowed man who told responders he set his Blake Street house on fire, it hit her: He could be the young boy she remembers from her class.

“I got chills all over my body,” she says. “I couldn’t even sleep that night.”

Medina has been in tears, playing it back in her head – the moments she would turn to her right and see the boy crying, the lunch periods when she shared her food with him, she says. When all the other kids rushed home at the end of the day, he would linger in the classroom, she says, sometimes just sitting down and putting his head on the desk.

“It was very apparent there was something wrong,” Medina says.

Medina moved away after fourth grade, but she still has family in Waterbury, including her cousin, the Rev. Kendrick Medina, who says the community has been astir over the emaciated man who emerged from the flames.

Rev. Medina, also 31, thinks about the milestones he’s experienced growing up in Waterbury – school, sports, graduation, raising kids of his own – while this young man’s world appears to have stopped turning as a child.

The faith leader’s peers are especially struck by the unfairness of it all, he says, standing in his front yard, strewn with small toy cars, a scooter and a toddler-sized slide.

“I would just say that we have to be more intentional with the next generation,” he says. “If we want a better Waterbury, then it really starts with us.”

When the boy’s family pulled him out of school, police say, his world narrowed.

He told detectives his stepmother kept him locked in a room, fed him very little and only allowed him out to perform chores and on Halloween. The last time he went trick-or-treating he was 12, he told police.

He dressed up as a firefighter.

‘Hoping we were going to get there in time’

Waterbury Deputy Fire Chief Bob Stoeckert was incident commander the night of the fire. He escorts a couple local journalists out of the spacious fire station, light streaming in through high windows onto the engines inside, before settling in to yet again recount one of the most significant rescues of his nearly four decades as a firefighter.

There’s no such thing as a “normal” fire, he begins. But when he arrived on Blake Street on February 17, it appeared to be a routine response.

Engine 11 was first on the scene, and when a member of the crew came out of the home carrying a 5-foot-9, 68-pound person covered in soot, Stoeckert assumed he was a young teenager.

“I didn’t think the victim was in good shape at all, and I was very surprised a couple minutes later to hear from the police sergeant that he was talking in the back of the ambulance,” the deputy chief says.

What the young man told responders was even more of a surprise: “I wanted my freedom.”

“Over my 37-year career, we’ve had plenty of arson fires, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard that someone lit a fire to be rescued from their confinement,” Stoeckert says.

“To start a fire in a room that small, just hoping that we were going to get there in time to get him out – that …” he takes a long pause, “It’s a different feeling.”

“In his last moments of captivity, in his last acts of desperation, he thought of one agency that could save his life, and that was the Waterbury Fire Department – and they did just that,” city police Detective Steve Brownell says.

As detectives searched the house in the days after the fire, evidence of the incredulous story the young man told in the back of the ambulance began to emerge.

There’s one image Brownell says he can’t shake: the locks on the door to the 8 foot by 9 foot storage space where he was kept.

“He tells a story, an unwavering story,” he says. “You do your follow-up investigation to try to corroborate what somebody may be telling you, and then you walk to an area where he’s saying he’s being held – and there you see it.”

Detectives took up a collection and shopped for some things the man might need – clothes, books, puzzles to pass the time – then put together a care package, complete with gift bags and tissue paper, Brownell says.

“It’s embarrassing to talk about,” he says. “We don’t put these things together for the publicity of it.”

Having seen the conditions the young man was living in, Brownell wondered, “Does he even know how to receive a gift?”

It turns out, he does.

“He’s appreciative. It put a smile on his face. He was very curious,” he says of the sweet, friendly person who greeted him with a warm smile in the hospital.

“He’s just kind of staring at it, like, ‘What could be in there?’”

‘Our job is to protect the people’

Sitting on the third floor of Waterbury’s bustling police station, Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo says he understands people want answers.

His officers have been fielding their barrage of queries at community meetings. He plans to meet soon with the commissioner of the state Children and Families Department.

“I feel responsible for the safety of this community and safety of the people in the community,” he says.

Spagnolo, who took the helm of the department in 2018, insists the police played this case by the book, even all those years ago. And while the child services agency may not have kept their records from that time, his department did.

Waterbury officers contacted the family on April 1 and 18 in 2004. They talked with the boy and found nothing that made them suspect “anything other than a normal childhood” was unfolding inside the home, the chief told reporters this month.

There’s ultimately one person responsible for the young man’s abuse, he says, and they arrested her.

“But it doesn’t make me feel less responsible for what occurred,” he says. “You know, that’s our job. Our job is to protect the people in this community, so in some senses – in this particular case – we weren’t able to do that.”

About half a mile away, Waterbury Mayor Paul K. Pernerewski Jr. sits in a large, stately office, with tall windows overlooking the street. In an ornate golden frame behind him hangs a painting of the city’s green space from a bygone era.

Waterbury was still a heavily industrial town when he was young, he begins, known for its brass mills.

He pauses – to take a call from his mom, who’s been having trouble with her furnace. She still lives in the house where he grew up. This is a family-oriented community, he explains, and even though Waterbury is the fifth-largest city in Connecticut, it feels like a small town.

“I think it’s really been heartbreaking for people to think this was going on under their noses, and nobody was aware of it,” he says.

But people were aware the boy’s well-being was in question: family members, educators, the state child services agency, the police department.

The reporting requirements for school officials who suspect abuse have become stricter in the last 20 years, Pernerewski notes. “But once you take a child out of the school system in Connecticut, the contact ends,” he says. “There’s no requirement for follow up. There’s no interaction.”

Since Sullivan’s arrest, there have been calls for a state-level investigation and a closer examination of its safety net for children, including homeschooling practices, around which there is little or no regulation, according to a 2018 Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate report.

“I think it would be helpful for kids who are homeschooled to have more benchmarks that they have to meet, so that there’s more of a connection,” the mayor says.

What happened at 2 Blake Street was a tragedy, Pernerewski says.

But, he adds, it was a one-off: “It’s not what Waterbury’s about.”

Many in the community still don’t know the young man’s name, but they’ve thrown their weight behind him. Residents have offered to help with his care. Some say they plan to come out to demonstrate their support for him when his stepmother has her day in court. And to date, a fundraiser organized by Safe Haven of Greater Waterbury, a non-profit that serves people facing domestic violence, has raised over $134,000 to help him recover.

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