The half-sister of a man who was held captive and starved in a Connecticut house of horrors for decades now wants those responsible for his tragic living conditions to be punished, insisting: “I want to see them all fried.”
Heather Tessman, who claims she spent years searching for her brother, lashed out after her 32-year-old sibling’s dramatic rescue from a burning Waterbury home last month uncovered a pattern of alleged abuse that authorities likened to “a horror movie.”
The victim’s stepmom, Kimberly Sullivan, 56, has since been charged with cruelty and kidnapping after he alleged she kept him in padlocked in a tiny room, starved him and deprived him of water so severely he was forced to drink from the toilet bowl.
“They deserve solitary confinement for the rest of their lives,” Tessman raged in an interview with WFSB about the stepmom and two stepsisters who, at one point, all lived in the house together.
“I want to see them all fried.”
Tessman, who shares a biological mom with the victim, said she only met her sibling once when she was just three years old — and had been searching for him nonstop since he turned 18.
During the hunt, Tessman claims those living inside the house of horrors — including the victim’s stepmom, stepsisters and his biological father — lied about his whereabouts.
“I think, personally, that she didn’t like that he was not her son, and she took it out on him,” Tessman alleged.
“Her daughters, they got to go to school, have friends, jobs, have a life. What did he get? A jail cell. For what? Locks on the outside of the door? Are you kidding me? You don’t treat people like that.”
Tessman said she was sickened when she finally learned the truth.
“Our [biological] mom had texted me when she found out to get a hold of her ASAP. We don’t talk very often so I knew something was up and she said ‘we found your brother, it was that man in Waterbury’,” Tessman recalled in an interview with CT Insider.
“I had seen [the news] in passing … and thought to myself, ‘Oh my god! How does this happen?’ and then a few days later, she gets a hold of me and I start connecting the dots,” she continued.
“I’ve been looking for him since he turned 18.”
The victim, who weighed a mere 68 pounds when he was rescued, is currently recovering in a hospital.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Tessman or their biological mom have been in contact with him since his rescue.
“He needs to know that I was trying to find him and that he matters,” Tessman said. “Life will go on, and we can only hope to grow and heal from here.”
The shocking details only emerged after the victim opened up to cops about the hellish conditions he was forced to endure since he was a child after he deliberately set his home on fire on Feb. 17 so he could escape the nightmare.
An investigation determined he had been held in captivity for more than 20 years, during which he was starved and neglected, authorities said.
“He was, without exaggeration, akin to a survivor of Auschwitz’s death camp,” officials said of the victim’s condition.
Sullivan, meanwhile, has professed her innocence. She is due in court on March 26.
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