An English couple who locked their 11-year-old son in a converted coal bunker every single night for a year will spend two years in prison, a judge ordered on Monday.
The Blackpool pair -- who aren't being named to protect the identity of the victim -- forced their boy to live and sleep in a cold, concrete room just big enough for a small mattress, BBC reported. They locked him inside every night with little more than a dirty sleeping bag and a container to use as a toilet.
"The room has been described as a cell but it seems to me it was akin to a prison cell from a third world country, not the home of an 11- or 12-year-old living in this century in this country," Judge Norman Wright told the mother and stepfather at their sentencing.
The boy, regularly bullied and constantly hungry, was left traumatized by his horrific living situation.
He was thrown into his prison-like room because he snuck food out of the fridge, Metro reported.
His school alerted social services when he came to school hungry every day.
The boy's biological father reportedly had no idea the abuse was taking place.
"It was horrible to think that someone had done that to my son," he told reporters. "I would never do it to an animal, let alone a child."
Related
Before You Go
