The prosecution rested Wednesday afternoon in the child abuse and false imprisonment case against Recardo Wimbush and Therian Wimbush. The Gwinnett County couple is accused of keeping one of their sons in a basement for 18 months and not bringing another son to a doctor when he developed a skin tumor that grew to the size of an adult fist.
The two sons, now 10 and 16, testified Tuesday and were cross-examined by their parents, who are acting as their own attorneys.
The son kept in the basement recalled spending most of his days with his ear pressed to the basement door, listening to his nine siblings playing and talking in their Buford home.
“I just wished I could be upstairs and be a part of it,” he said on closed circuit television from a witness room in the Gwinnett County Courthouse.
The room where he was kept was described as "the size of a twin bed," with the sole window painted over and lightbulbs removed. The boy, now 16, had a fungal rash, bone loss and vitamin D deficiency when he was let out of the basement, and struggled to walk and climb stairs at times because of pain in his legs, a pediatrician testified.
Recardo and Therian Wimbush told Gwinnett County police that they kept their son in the basement for "disciplinary reasons" when they were arrested in 2014. In court, they implied their son may have chosen to live in the basement. The son testified it was "not my idea."
When the older son was removed from the basement, he was thin with long, jagged nails from picking paint off the basement walls, Department of Family and Child Services Det. Patricia Boon testified. The boy could not remember the last time he had bathed and was “very, very thin to the point where I thought he might be malnourished,” said Leanne Chancy, an attorney and former guardian ad litem for the older son.
The younger son had not seen a doctor until he was removed from his parents’ custody in 2014, at age 7. When he saw Dr. Louis Rapkin, a pediatric oncologist, his tumor was the “most extensive” Rapkin had ever seen. Rapkin testified that the giant-cell fibroblastoma the younger son had typically would have taken “years” to grow to the size it was.
The Wimbushes began their defense Wednesday afternoon by questioning six of their 10 children
The case is expected to conclude this week, Gwinnett County Assistant District Attorney Dan Mayfield said Tuesday.
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