DALLAS, Ga. — New details were emerging Friday as investigators prepared to search the suburban home of a reclusive Georgia couple accused of child cruelty after an emaciated 18-year-old said he was kept there in isolation for years – often forced to kneel – and then dumped by bus in Los Angeles.

Authorities said they planned to conduct an afternoon search at the home where authorities allege Mitch Comer was kept in such seclusion in a bedroom that his two younger sisters in the same house did not know what he looked like.

"The sisters haven't seen the brother in over two years," Paulding County sheriff's Cpl. Ashley Henson said. "They didn't even know what color his hair was."

Neighbors on the quiet cul-de-sac of two-story brick and vinyl siding homes, about 30 miles outside Atlanta, said the couple kept to themselves and the two girls didn't ride the neighborhood school bus or leave their yard.

Stepfather Paul Comer and mother Sheila Comer faced charges of false imprisonment and cruelty to children, Paulding County jail records show. They were being held without bond.

Phone messages left for lawyers for Paul and Sheila Comer were not immediately returned Friday afternoon.

The FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation have joined the case, Henson said.

Mitch Comer told police his stepfather gave him $200 and a list of homeless shelters before he was put on a bus to Los Angeles on this 18th birthday, police in Los Angles said Thursday.

Retired Los Angeles police Sgt. Joe Gonzalez was working security at a downtown bus station Sept. 11 when he spotted the 87-pound teenage boy who stood just over 5 feet tall and looked much younger, Los Angeles police said in a statement Thursday.

Because he was so childlike, police worried that he wasn't as old as he claimed and decided to investigate further. The teen told authorities he had suffered years of abuse after being taken out of school in the eighth grade.

The boy said he was fed small quantities of food daily, according to the Los Angeles police statement.

Arrest warrants filed Sept. 12 and 13 in Georgia say Mitch's stepfather and mother "made Mitch kneel on the floor, bend his head and place his forehead against the wall, and place his hands behind his head for long periods of time."

Paul Comer had his own business repairing home appliances, said next-door neighbor John White. They rarely spoke.

Comer's wife never left the house unless she was with her husband, not even to check the mail, White said. Their two daughters would sometimes come outside and play, but only in the back yard. Neighbors assumed the girls didn't go to school either – they never caught the bus that picked up other children in the cul-de-sac every morning.

Neighbors said they had no clue the Comers had a son until a detective came knocking at their doors asking questions last week.

"I had no idea, no clue. There were no signs of a son at all," said Dion Walker, who's lived next to the Comers for two years. "The few occasions we would see them go to the van, it was always the parents and the two girls."

She said her 8-year-old daughter would occasionally play with the Comer girls, who she initially thought were the same age as her own daughter. They were the same size and seemed to have the same maturity level. However, she said police later told her the Comer girls were 11 and 13.

The neighbor girls never left their own yard, Walker said. She said the Comer family did not take part in neighborhood association meetings and their girls never attended the neighborhood Halloween block parties.

"We said one day, why don't you come over here? And they said their father would not let them cross the yard. So from that point I stopped letting my daughter go over there. And they would just stare at us."

Walker said police swarmed the Comers' home last week, arresting the parents and taking both girls into protective custody.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21...03133.html

Sickening...

Sad   Poor kid.  

I hope this boy can stay with his sisters and get to know them.  They can help each other to cope.

This is why I feel it is important that there are systems in place to check on the well-being of children who are home-schooled.  It's too easy for abusers like this to isolate children.

Yes.  Some states here are better than others.  

A friend of mine who homeschooled all her kids did a fantastic job, they're brilliant and several are through college now, but she missed a few problems that should have been addressed early on.  One child had speech problems, another has a vision problem, another has pretty bad facial tics, and one child has PDD.  These problems are easily identified by educators or through school screenings.  

A lot of homeschoolers are paranoid about state involvement.  It is unfortunate because they miss out on a lot of services like speech therapy that could be provided to their kids, often in their own home.

The problem is you have to balance the centralising influence of a state with its ability to provide competent and informed personnel and high-quality equipment.  

Still, a lot of school decisions in this country are very local.  Much easier to change than the policies that may come from the capital.

I was homeschooled, but thats because I stopped going to school in the eighth grade (and thus failed out).

I never considered homeschooling as a way to conceal torture, this is horrible to hear.

Did you enjoy it?  I was always so jealous of my homeschooled friends from church.  They did a few hours of work a day, and then pursued hobbies.  One girl was a figure skater.  She skated for hours every day.

I liked it. I wrote my own school schedule, and studied whatever I wanted as long as they fell within designated subjects, and a few of my own interests. Fortunately my father was a public school teacher so I wasn't required to take any standardized tests--he only had to give me a grade!

AND, I got to make up my own tests, and grade myself. I wrote short stories, learned how to read arabic, and some vocabulary. At the time I thought about becoming a heart surgeon so I made many sketches of the human heart...

I liked it a lot

Then I started taking college courses in 11th grade, and also in 12th grade which was awesome because it was completely free through a post-secondary program. Even the books were free

And I began to do some community service while I was in the post-secondary program, which was fun. I was a very fortunate homeschooler!

There's also the issue that part of the reason education is declining is that parents can't supplement the work of teachers any more, because wages have not gone up to keep pace with inflation let alone the commodities that go up faster than inflation.  Because of this, the anti-education lobby tries to say that education "doesn't work" so funding gets cut, teachers get fired, schools fail to be renovated, and computers stay out of date, if they are available in the first place.  So education level declines further, wages decline further, and the cycle continues.

Great so America is spiraling down to an un-educated country because parents can't take up the slack of educating their own children ?

I'm just saying that if I had a child, I'd want to homeschool him/her but not only prepare him/her for a G.E.D. but to teach him/her how to live out on his/her own. Like how to manage money, grow food in a garden, how to work for food if he/her ever becomes homeless or etc...

I guess I want to teach my child/ren a lot of my qualities and not my bad ones.... :/

No, it's because of class conflict.  

Having the Soviet Union as our Great Satan was very handy for people whose best interest lies in covering up the nature or existence of class conflict in capitalist societies.  

Now that the soviets are gone, the haves no longer "need" a robust, educated middle class and can safely transform us into a third world country.

Reminds me of the one case about eight or nine years ago with those three adopted brothers who were also starved and abused. Anyone else remember? The reason it was found out was because the oldest was going through a neighbor's garbage and the man thought the kid was a little boy. Turned out he was seventeen or eighteen but so malnourished he was smaller than most boys his age. The adopted parents had all these other kids and they were treated and fed much better than these three boys were and claimed "the boys have a disorder" or something. II think that People magazine, who broke the story first, did a follow up last year and showed what the two youngest looked like today. They are now at a healthy weight and in loving home together. They changed their names so they wouldn't be associated with their horrible past but the third boy is now over eighteen and on his own but did not want to be reminded of his past. I hope he has found a place where he is as happy as he possibly can be with what he endured and is healthy.

I found a link to the story I'm talking about.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18563_162-6260271.html

This post was last modified: 09-22-2012 01:32 AM by Captain Jigglypuff.

Was there not a state in the US which banned home schooling for a time because of a case where children were withdrawn from or not sent to school and turned out to have been horribly abused and neglected?

^I think the story I mentioned is the case you're thinking of. The link said that there were actually four of them being so neglected and mistreated that one of the kids was actually eating wall board which is pretty intense.