'You feel like an animal': Brother of boy isolated in basement describes horrific conditions in adoptive parents' home

By Carol Robinson | crobinson@al.com

Few can know or imagine what it's like being locked in a basement for days, weeks or months, denied the basic needs such as food, water, a bathroom. Denied, even, sunshine or love.

Eddie Carter knows. He is the biological brother of a 14-year-old boy rescued from a Helena basement three weeks ago. Carter's brother weighed only 55 pounds when hospitalized.

Carter says he suffered the same neglect, abuse and despair, at the hands of the adoptive parents, both of whom remain jailed on $1 million bond.

"You're down there and nobody knows you're down there except the people in the house,'' said Carter in extensive interviews with 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."

Now 18 and far removed from Alabama and his brother, it's all coming back to Carter with news of his baby brother's ordeal. "There is a little hate building up inside for the people who did this,'' Carter said. "But Thanksgiving just passed and there is a lot I have to be grateful for. He's one of them. He's alive and it could be worse, so I keep that in mind."

The plight of Carter's brother's came to light the weekend of Nov. 12 when the young Helena teen was taken to Children's of Alabama. Helena police Chief Pete Folmar said the boy was kept in "forced isolation" and was described by doctors as severely and chronically malnourished, dehydrated, suffering from acute respiratory distress, shock, hypothermia, hypothyroid and close to death.

His adoptive parents, Richard and Cynthia Kelly, ages 56 and 47, two days later were charged with aggravated child abuse, a Class B felony with a possible sentence anywhere from two to 20 years in prison if convicted. They've remained behind bars in the Shelby County jail since their arrest, and are set to appear in court on Dec. 14 and 15 for preliminary hearings. Their attorneys have not responded to a request for interviews for this story.

The police chief, determined to get justice in a courtroom and not in the media, is reluctant to discuss the case. At an emotional press conference on Nov. 15, Folmar said the probe began when they were notified by Children's through the Shelby County Department of Human Resources. Detectives responded first to the hospital, and then to the family's home on Spruce Drive in the Royal Pines subdivision off of County Road 17.

According to the arrest warrants for the parents, the couple is accused of denying food, nourishment and medical care to the boy, who was "subjected to forced isolation for extended period of time." Authorities have said that "isolation" was disciplinary in nature. There were no signs, however, the boy was handcuffed, chained or bodily restrained in any way.

Also living at the home was the couple's 19-year-old daughter, who was adopted as an infant, and a 21-year-old man believed to be the daughter's boyfriend. Neither Richard nor Cynthia Kelly, who have lived in Helena for about 20 years, show any previous criminal record in Alabama. Richard Kelly worked in the computer technology field - most recently for a software company off of U.S. 280 - but had been unemployed for several weeks at the time of his arrest. Cynthia Kelly was a stay-at-home mother who home-schooled her adopted children.

Neighbors said they were stunned by news of the boy's condition and arrest of the adoptive parents. Though the family kept to themselves and didn't socialize with others in the neighborhood, they said they saw no signs of anything amiss at the home. They said they weren't even aware there was a teen girl there, and said they only saw the 14-year-old son occasionally cutting grass with Richard Kelly watching over him.

"He was so small, I thought he was about 8 or 10,'' said next-door neighbor Troy Clayton. "It took all he had to push the lawnmower."

Cynthia Kelly's Instagram account, which has recently been deleted, depicted a life far different from what authorities believe was happening in the home to the young boy. She had one account just for her dog, Kennedy Ann, and showed pictures of an elaborate first birthday party for the pup, complete with a banner and a table full of colorful gifts for the canine.

That infuriates Carter. "Seeing the things they did, their online persona, but then there's someone down there rotting in the basement,'' Carter said. "I can't wrap my head around it."

Honeymoon is over

It was a lot to take in. And always has been, really.

Carter and his younger brother were the fourth and fifth kids born to their biological mother in the Huntsville area before their mother lost her parental rights. He didn't say why she lost her rights, and he doesn't really remember how old they were when they were put into foster care. Foster care and adoption records in Alabama are private.

What Carter does recall is bouncing around from foster home to foster home - pretty much all over northern and central Alabama. The bright spot, he said, is that he and his brother were never separated. "I took care of him a lot, changing his diapers and stuff, making sure he was eating. When he was sleeping, I'd check his chest to make sure he was breathing,'' Carter said. "My little brother was like my golden egg. I just had to keep him safe. It was my main goal not to be separated ever."

"Usually we'd go to foster homes where there were other kids there,'' he said. "I looked out for my brother, especially if the state was making decisions that pertained to both of us. You learn how to be protective. You realize what matters most, what's most valuable and my brother was most valuable. Yeah, we were really close. I didn't let nobody bother him."

The foster homes weren't bad, and sometimes they were good, but they weren't home. And though young, Carter and his brother weren't so young that they didn't feel the stigma. "You figure out what normal is. You go to school every day with normal people. Their moms, their dads, their grandmoms, their aunties, they're dropping them off at school. They're picking them up,'' he said. "You're going back home with someone you don't know."

Carter was about 11 years old, and his brother about 7, when Cynthia and Richard Kelly came into their lives through a Christian adoption agency. "This is it,'' he recalls thinking at the time. "It's a big shot to get adopted. It's really exciting, especially for a kid who grows up unfortunate. It's a really great feeling. It was our big break."

He doesn't remember feeling one way or another about the couple, or their adopted daughter who was one year older than Carter but had long been part of the family. "They were all right. You don't really judge a book by its cover so I was just going with the flow,'' he said. "I just wanted to be the best I could and put everything behind me that was in the past and move on, but you're still hesitant to get attached."

"You try to fit in, especially with people who want to take you in,'' he said. "You try to walk the fine line of what's expected of you."

He said it was normal, at first. "We ate as a family. I like Chinese and there was a Chinese place down the street so I was like, 'We're good!''' he said. "Our first day there I had sesame chicken and Doritos and they were like, 'If you want, you can eat this every day.' My brother was happy. We had toys and stuff."

Asked if it felt like home, Carter said, "For a little bit, yeah. But then, like people say, the true colors came out. The honeymoon cycle is over and, after that, everything went to crap."

Carter said he was a rough and tumble kind of a kid, and began to get in trouble. "I know growing up in the South you get a butt-whooping and I respect that. Spare the rod, spoil the child,'' he said. "But there's a fine line between disciplinary actions and going way too far. It was over excessive. I saw them as torture methods."

About halfway through his 18 months of living with his adoptive family, Carter began to get banished to the basement, he said. He thinks the first time was because he broke one of his sister's dolls. He said there was a bed down there, but no bathroom. The light switches had been altered so he couldn't turn them on and off. There was a door to the outside, but it was locked. There was, of course, the door leading into the house as well, but there was a motion sensor on it to alert the family if he opened it.

He wasn't down there all of the time at first. "I had chances to come out or whatever, but they would always provoke or instigate a situation just to make up something for me to go back down there and that kept happening and happening and happening,'' he said. "So that was the period I just stayed down there."

His least favorite food was vegetables. And that, he said, is what he had to eat in the basement. "You grow up with the fear of what you don't like and vegetables was like my kryptonite,'' he said. "I still, to this day, don't eat peas, carrots and corn."

Sometimes, he said, he was given even less. "They would say, 'Jesus survived off bread and water, so you can too,''' he said. "It was like a torture method. They were upstairs eating pizza and Chinese, and I'd be eating bread and water."

He said he was down there sometimes for months at a time. The worst was when the sun set. "When it got dark, it got dark,'' he said. "You can hear everyone laughing or doing whatever upstairs, and you're just stuck. I hated it. And that was when I started questioning everything."

"What's going through these people's heads?" he said. "Like take away my toys, but me being young and in a basement, that's not going to teach me anything. There was no explanation except, 'You need to learn.'''

"There were some days I'd be locked down there and I had to use the bathroom in the corner,'' he said. "The room stank like piss. It was really horrible."

He developed a nervous habit of chewing his lips, often until they were bloody, open wounds. Richard and Cynthia Kelly, he said, would pour salt into those wounds, also as a form of punishment.

Carter rebelled. "I would bang on the walls just to keep people awake in the house,'' he said.  "I got aggressive, like, 'I'm not about to stay down here. Hell no. I wasn't having it, and think I said I was going to do something to somebody.''

Moving on but looking back

Ultimately, Carter was sent away from the home. He went to one behavioral health center in the Birmingham area, and then another. At the second, he said, he had a wonderful therapist who helped him immensely. He then went to a boys' residential school for learning and behavioral problems in western Alabama, and then to another behavioral health care facility in Montgomery.

After his treatment, he was put back into foster care and attended Huffman High School as a freshman. It was during that time that he learned he was being adopted again, this time by a family in Tucson, Arizona. He was excited about the prospect, but missing his little brother. "That was my main concern. I thought about him every single day,'' he said. "At that point, I was blaming myself for getting sent away."

Still, he said, there was never any sign of mistreatment of his little brother while he was living at the Kelly home, so Carter tried to worry less. "I was just moving on and I prayed. I prayed it didn't happen to him,'' he said. "When I left, he was all right."

Carter was adopted in 2013 by Arizona rapper Nick Carter, known as Murs, and his wife, Kate who just months before had also adopted an infant boy. At one point, about two years ago, Carter, who took the last name of his Arizona adoptive parents, said he and his newly adoptive father took a road trip to see Carter's biological family - now living in Mississippi - and then stopped by Helena in hopes of seeing his little brother.

They pulled up in front of the home, Murs went to the front door. Carter remained in the car because he didn't want to cause any trouble. His father spoke briefly with Richard Kelly, who told him Carter couldn't see his brother. Instead, Carter got only a glimpse from afar. "I saw his face but I didn't get to say hello,'' he said. "He looked really skinny but I didn't think nothing of it at the time."