Philly Landlord

Dog bowls led Philadelphia landlord to basement dungeon
Oct 20, 07:49 PM EDT


By Dave Warner


PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The rescue of four starving, mentally handicapped people held captive in the filthy basement of a Philadelphia building began with a landlord's suspicions about a pair of dog bowls.


Turgut Gozleveli, a retired electrical contractor who cares for the building, told Reuters on Thursday how on a routine inspection a week ago, he noticed missing lightbulbs in the basement and dog bowls under a workbench table.


His discoveries ultimately led to the arrest of four people on kidnapping charges and the rescue of three men and a woman from the cramped basement dungeon in the working class Tacony neighborhood.


Authorities said the captors held the mentally handicapped adults to steal their Social Security checks, and investigators were pursuing the possibility as many as 50 people were victimized in a fraud scheme across several states.


Gozleveli, 71, who speaks with a Turkish accent, said he assumed a tenant had stolen the bulbs but was mystified by the bowls in the no-pets-allowed apartment building.


"I knocked on the doors and said, 'Is anyone feeding a pet?'" he recalled. All of the tenants he spoke to in the seven-unit building, once a small neighborhood movie theater, said no.


On Friday, he looked again and the bowls were still there.


On Saturday, he ventured down a few steps leading to a subbasement housing water heaters and another smaller room holding an out-of-use furnace.


Flashlight in hand, he saw a chain wrapped around the handle of the metal door to the old furnace room. He unwrapped the chain and opened the door to find two small barking dogs and piles of blankets on wooden platforms on the dirt floor.


He pulled back the edge of a dirty quilt to find a man and a woman huddled underneath. There seemed to be little else in the room except a urine-filled bucket that served as a toilet.


"I said, 'Get the hell out of here,'" he said, before calling police. "I thought they were squatters."


Inside the small room, police found two more men -- one in a ragged sleeping bag and one chained to the rusty furnace.


When they emerged into the daylight, "they were kind of beat up, walking like they were drunk, unsteady," the landlord recalled. Police said the victims were mentally challenged with the intellectual capacities of 10-year-olds.


Further search turned up yet another dog, a larger one penned inside a wooden enclosure that Gozleveli knew tenant Jean McIntosh used for storage.


McIntosh, 32, has been charged in the case, as has her mother, Linda Ann Weston, 51, who is suspected of being ringleader of the scheme. Weston has already served prison time for starving a man to death in her North Philadelphia apartment some 30 years ago.


Also under arrest are Gregory Thomas, 47, of North Philadelphia, and Eddie Wright, 50, said to be homeless.


"One of the people said 'Linda brought us here,'" Gozleveli said, an apparent reference to Weston.


Within a short time of his discovery, Gozleveli said the apartment building was swarming with dozens of police officers.


Gozleveli believed he found the victims in the nick of time, and said he was thankful he had not waited another day to start poking around the dark basement.


"They would have been dead," he said.


Once discovered, the victims were taken to area hospitals and placed in custodial care, officials said.


(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Cynthia Johnston)


</SPAN>This is just plain sick, I hope these Bassturds get the death penalty over this type of abuse......:mad:

Execution is too good for these people. Lock them up for life, in the same conditions they held their victims in.

[B]Philadelphia (CNN)[/B] -- The suspects charged with imprisoning four mentally disabled people in a Philadelphia boiler room may have been holding seven other people, including the accused ringleader's 19-year-old niece and six children, police said Wednesday.
The niece, Beatrice Weston, had been kept in a closet in an upstairs apartment in the same building where the first four were found Saturday afternoon, police said. She was being treated for "horrific" injuries after being found beaten, malnourished and covered with scars Tuesday afternoon, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey told reporters.
"I've been a police officer for more than 40 years, and I've never seen injuries like this," Ramsey said.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter added, "I'm not sure horrific covers it. This is sheer madness."
The owner of the northeast Philadelphia apartment building found the original four victims locked in a dank sub-basement chamber that reeked of urine and excrement. Authorities are investigating whether Beatrice Weston's aunt, 51-year-old Linda Weston, and three others now charged in the case had been stealing the victims' Social Security checks.
The 19-year-old was being held in the apartment rented by Linda Weston's daughter, Jean McIntosh, who became the fourth person charged in the case Wednesday afternoon, Philadelphia police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers told CNN.
"Jean was a cooperating witness. We didn't know she was a defendant," Evers said. "But after talking with the captives and others, we discovered Jean was lying."
When police returned to the building Tuesday with a warrant to search McIntosh's apartment, Beatrice Weston had been moved. But they found evidence she had been there, and convinced McIntosh to produce her, Evers said. Beatrice Weston had burn marks on her body and marks on her ankles as though she'd been struck by pellets, Ramsey said -- injuries that clearly had been inflicted over some length of time.
"This girl was beaten and tortured. It makes you want to cry when you see her," Ramsey said.
Beatrice Weston, who had been reported missing in 2009, and the six children were taken into protective custody at various locations around Philadelphia as the investigation spread, Evers said. In addition, McIntosh's 8- and 10-year-old children were also placed in protective custody, he said.
McIntosh, 32, was charged with kidnapping, conspiracy, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, aggravated assault, simple assault, burglary and trespass, the Philadelphia district attorney's office said in a statement. A judge set her bail at $1 million Wednesday, office spokeswoman Tasha Jameson said. Bail has been set at $2.5 million apiece for Weston and the two men charged in the case, 47-year-old Gregory Thomas and 49-year-old Eddie Wright.
"I'm feeling sick to my stomach," Danyell Tisdale, a neighborhood block captain who alerted landlord Turgut Gozleveli to suspicious activity, told CNN on Wednesday. "I was speaking so highly for her. She was a nice neighbor and didn't bother anybody. It's shocking to me that she had anything to do with it. My sister's children played with her two children."
Police believe two of the six children placed in protective custody Wednesday -- ages 2 and 5 -- are the children of Tamara Breeden, one of the four people found in the boiler room. Authorities did not divulge how Breeden became pregnant.
Investigators took DNA samples from Breeden and the three men held with her to determine whether any of them are fathers of the children, Evers said.
Breeden, Edwin Sanabria and Herbert Knowles were found locked in the pitch-black, 15-by-6-foot room with no food and only a bucket for a toilet. A fourth man, identified as Derwin McLemire, had been chained to the boiler, police said.
McLemire, Breeden and a Knowles, told CNN affiliate KYW that their Social Security information was taken from them, that they had been beaten and that they lived in fear of their alleged captors.
"That was real dirty of you. That was wrong," a tearful McLemire told KYW. He said he is from North Carolina, that he met Weston on an online dating site and had once he attempted to escape, only to be recaptured.
The FBI joined the probe after detectives discovered one of the accused had traveled to at least two other states with the people found in the boiler room.
Weston served eight years in prison for killing her sister's boyfriend in the early 1980s, Ramsey said earlier. In that case, the victim "was held captive for an extended period of time, locked in a closet and he literally starved to death," he said.
"You would think that someone who's committed a crime that horrific would still be in jail," he said Tuesday. "But she wasn't, and obviously she wasn't fully rehabilitated, either."


[URL]http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/19/justice/pennsylvania-disabled-chained/index.html[/URL]

you would think that if this scum bag served 8 years in prison for doing this prior to being caught again for it. That the Parole officer would have done a better job of checkin up on this low life...

I hope that this info gets passed along to other agencies and other Parole Officer's take a little more time and effort into their jobs....

makes me just want to take a gun and blow everyone of these people's heads off that abused these poor people. The pain and suffereing that this 19 year old girl went thru must have been terrible...Lord knows what really happened to her and her children.

Srry for ranting on about this, but this has really hit a nerve with me and days of my childhood living with a stepmother after my real father got sent to the Indiana State Farm...Yes this type of crap does exist that children go thru during their lives and I experienced it first hand until I was 7 years old.......:(

Death by paper cut in a salt mine.

Nothing to apologize for, Mills. You and I disagree on a lot of stuff, but we're totally together on this. I too was very disturbed when I read of this. Just thinking about what those poor people went through breaks my heart. And another thing that gets me is the thought that there is most likely someone else out there doing the same thing to someone else, right now.