‘Cinderella with no happy ending’: Starved Alabama teen locked in basement shares horrifying testimony

By Carol Robinson | crobinson@al.com

A Jefferson County teen locked alone in a concrete basement for an average of 23 hours a day, reaching the point of near death from starvation, faced his adoptive parents in court Thursday, the first time he has seen or spoken to them in four years.

Ethan Kelly, now an 18-year-old Jefferson County high school senior, recounted the days, weeks and years that led up to him being hospitalized at age 14 weighing less than 55 pounds.

When taken to Shelby Baptist Medical Center on Nov. 13, 2016 and later airlifted to Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham, Ethan was nearly dead. He was severely and chronically malnourished, dehydrated, suffering from acute respiratory distress, shock, hypothermia, and hypothyroidism.

Pictures of the boy taken at the hospital showed pressure sores on his legs and open wounds on his knees. He was non-verbal, had tremors and would likely not have lived much longer.

It was not the ending he thought he was getting when he and his older brother, Eddie Carter, were adopted in 2007 by Shelby County couple Richard and Cynthia Kelly into what Ethan and his brother thought would finally be their forever home.

"This wasn’t the dream. I cried every night and prayed for Jesus to end it all,'' Ethan testified during the sentencing hearing for his parents, who pleaded guilty in December 2019 to a reduced charge of child abuse. “I’m not who I used to be. I’m not even who I was supposed to be. I lived the story of Cinderella with no happy ending.”

‘You are not fit to care for children.’

After seven hours of testimony, some so horrific that the lead police investigator broke down in tears, Shelby County Circuit Judge William H. Bostick sentenced the couple to the maximum allowed under the charge to which they pleaded guilty – 10 years with two years behind bars.

"As a child who has been wronged by the people who were charged with is care and custody, I heard him (Ethan) say he wanted you to go to prison. And Ethan, you have come to the right place,'' Bostick said. “Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, it was in your best interest to enter a plea to this charge because if I had the authority, I would sentence you to a lot more than a 10-year split-two sentence. It would be somewhere in the realm of 20 years to life if I weren’t constrained by the law. But I am.”

The couple must serve every day of the two years in state prison, followed by three years of supervised probation.

They each are fined $10,000, court costs and are to initiate no contact with Ethan.

"Finally,'' the judge said, “you are permanently barred from ever serving as a foster or adopting a child. That is a condition I think will stem naturally from this sentence, but I’m imposing it as a condition of this sentence. You are not fit to care for children.”

The case against Richard and Cynthia Kelly, ages 60 and 51, was prosecuted by assistant district attorneys Daniel McBrayer and Brooke Grigsby. Richard Kelly was represented by attorney John Medaris, and Cynthia Kelly by attorney Dan Alexander.

‘He was essentially dying.’

Ethan’s plight came to light the weekend of Nov. 12, 2016 when Richard Kelly took the boy to the hospital. Ethan was placed on a ventilator for about a week. Doctors, alarmed by his condition, summoned DHR which immediately contacted Helena police.

Helena police Det. Sean Boczar explained a series of photos shown to the court Thursday, both from an unresponsive Ethan while he was hospitalized, hooked up to both a feeding tube and a breathing tube, as well as images of the room in which Ethan had been kept.

Boczar said doctors told police that when Ethan was first brought to the hospital, he was non-verbal, drooling and suffering from full-body tremors. An abrasion on Ethan’s knee had been covered by his father with duct tape, the detective testified. Doctors told police, “There was a chance Ethan would not make it.”

Children’s of Alabama physician Dr. Melissa Peters, who specializes in child abuse and pediatric trauma, testified to a laundry list of physical ailments suffered by Ethan that all stemmed from severe malnutrition. There were no underlying physical conditions, she said, that led to his failure to thrive.

"His body was failing in all of the critical ways that keep us alive,'' Peters said. “He was essentially dying.”

The family lived on Bruce Street in Helena.

In addition to Ethan, their adopted daughter Tamara lived at the home, as did another young man, Jacob Evans, whom the Kellys had taken in at age 17 when his guardians gave up custody of him.

Ethan’s older brother, Eddie, had only lived with the family for one year – 2007 until 2008- at which time they relinquished custody of him after repeated behavior issues they said they could not handle.

Boczar took the court through a photographed tour of the split-level home which looked like any other – upstairs, anyway.

There were multiple photographs of Tamara and Jacob on the walls, and even photo collages of the family dog.

Likewise, there were Christmas presents under the tree – addressed to Tamara and Jacob and the dog.

Noticeably missing, Boczar said, were photos of, and presents for, Ethan.

But any sense of normalcy disappeared when the photos emerged of Ethan’s bedroom, the only bedroom on the lower floor of the house.

The barren room consisted only of a box spring – not a mattress – on the floor and a fly strip hanging from the ceiling. There two locks and an alarm on the outside of Ethan’s bedroom door. There were two windows – that did not open – with curtains.

It was when the detective was asked to explain the large dirt stains on the window curtains that Boczar broke down and had to take a moment to compose himself.

"The dirt stains were from Ethan drying his hands,'' Boczar said. “He was not allowed to use any towels in the house.”

"It all changed when I saw Ethan’s bedroom,'' the detective said. “I had to second guess myself that someone was actually living in that room.”

Ethan was provided diapers, Boczar said, because he had gotten in trouble for urinating in a litter box.

‘They told me no one loved me.’

Testimony showed that Ethan spent as much as 23 hours a day in that room.

He was locked in from at least 11 p.m. until morning when he was allowed a supervised trip to the bathroom before being put back in the room. There was a surveillance camera in the room but it was not functioning. The purpose, Boczar said, “was to intimidate and have him think they were always watching him.”

In interviews with Richard and Cynthia Kelly, the detective said, the parents explained that Ethan was destructive and had destroyed everything that had at one point been in the bedroom, such as bookshelves and a stereo. Because he was so destructive, they told police, things were taken away from as a form of punishment.

As for Ethan’s food, the parents said they fed him once a day, and sometimes twice.

They controlled his food, they explained, because if they didn’t, he would eat too much. Most of his meals were taken in his room because the beloved family dog would bark whenever Ethan was present. "That’s why he was separate from everyone else,'' Boczar said.

Ethan was hospitalized for more than a month before he was released into a therapeutic foster home.

Now, four years later, he is in his second foster home since his release from the hospital. Prosecutors accepted the couple’s guilty plea because last year Ethan did not want to testify against his parents and didn’t even want them to go to prison, at least not for long.

That changed, however, and Ethan took the stand Thursday to read a lengthy statement during which he said he was beaten with belts and wooden paddles, fed food laced with hot sauce, made to run laps around the yard and bang his head against the wall. Salt and alcohol were poured into his open wounds.

"They told me I was a bad child,'' Ethan said, explaining that he was moved to the basement when he was 11. “They told me no one loved me or would ever love me.”

"Even though you’ll never say, ‘I’m sorry,'’ Ethan told the Kellys in court, “I forgive you.”

‘Nobody knows you’re down there.’

Richard and Cynthia Kelly also took the stand.

They denied any abuse of Ethan or keeping him confined and out of public view. They said they took him on multiple trips a year and to all of his sister’s cheerleading competitions, football games, and their homeschool after curricular activities.

He was punished, they said, because of his destructive behavior and they also said they feared him. Cynthia Kelly said she woke to Ethan’s hands around her neck once, and the parents said Ethan had threatened to get a kitchen knife and kill them all in their sleep.

The couple said they didn’t try to get Ethan medical or psychiatric help because they had tried that with his older brother, and it had not worked. The teen’s biological brother, Eddie Carter, spoke extensively with AL.com shortly after the couple’s arrest.

He says he suffered the same neglect, abuse and despair at the hands of Richard and Cynthia Kelly. He said he was kept in the basement for weeks and months at a time.

"You’re down there and nobody knows you’re down there except the people in the house,'' Carter told AL.com.

"It’s up to those people to make sure everything’s going to be all right and it’s not all right and you’re kinda lost. You sit in the corner and weigh out what means the most. It was horrible. Horrific.

"It gets to that point where you’re like an animal,'' Carter said. “You feel like an animal.”

Carter last year filed a lawsuit against the boys' adoptive parents.

“The conduct of Richard Kelly and Cynthia Kelly was intentional or reckless, was extreme and outrageous, was unacceptable in a civilized society, was the cause of Ethan’s emotional distress and physical injury and resulted in emotional distress so severe that no reasonable person should be expected to endure it,” according to the suit.

The lawsuit asks for an unspecified amount of compensatory damages and punitive damages of $5 million.

‘We did what we thought was best.’

The family also testified they could not afford to get that type of care for Ethan, though they received $500 month from DHR to help take care of their adopted son. District Attorney McBrayer pointed out they had a brand-new car in the garage and had listed at least 15 trips and outings the family took each year.

Both Richard and Cynthia Kelly testified that they did not abuse Ethan, nor do they think they did anything wrong. "We did what we thought was best,'' Richard Kelly said.

"We did not intend to hurt our son,'' Cynthia Kelly said. “Maybe we missed some signs. If I could do it over again, I would get him help.”

"I disagree when the D.A. says when he says we have no sorrow and no remorse. I have a lot of sorrow. I love Ethan. I’ve always loved Ethan and if I could back and take him to the doctor sooner and just fix all this I would, but I can’t,'' she said. “He has not seen me cry everyday for four years . He has not walked in my shoes and known the grief of not just of losing Eddie but also of losing Ethan and it is grief. It is full-blown grief.”

Judge Bostick wasted no time in letting the couple know his feelings.

"I’ve spent most of today listening to the evidence presented by both sides and trying to get a grip on how I could be so shocked when I watched the video of your son at (the hospital) being interviewed knowing in advance – because the lawyers told me – this was a 14 boy but it looking like a 5 or 6 year old,'' he said.

“I didn’t realize until today why it is the two of you didn’t recognize what everybody else saw, from the officers that came to your home to investigate the offense to the doctor who quite clearly distinguished Ethan from any other case that she has seen to the members of the community to the prosecution in this matter.”

"I do accept that raising Ethan was difficult. I accept that he had problems, but parents are expected to solve problems, not ignore them. And I believe that the two of you did willfully maltreat him and that’s the allegation that you pled guilty to,'' Bostick said.

“I accept that you may have been blinded to it because you lost perspective and the reason you lost perspective is because you did lock him away. You did shield him from public view. You never saw him in the context of other children his age. I heard no testimony from Ethan or from you Mr. Kelly or from you Mrs. Kelly or any other witness that Ethan had friends as a young boy growing up. And you know why he didn’t? Because he was locked in a basement with a strip of fly paper and some box springs.”

"Ethan, if I may say so, I’m glad you almost died four years ago. Because if your physical condition hadn’t gotten bad enough to require that medical intervention, you probably wouldn’t be here today,'' Bostick said.

“And I accept as true the doctor’s testimony that she was able to exclude virtually any other condition except for that these two didn’t care for you the way they should have but you can overcome that. You’re not chained by genetics. You’re not bound by DNA. You have grown, you are now thriving. I appreciate you being here today. But it took you almost dying to get these two’s attention.”