Video shows Turpin children rescued by California police

Video shows Turpin children rescued by California police



This is the moment some of the 13 children held captive by their parents in the California house of horror were rescued by police.



New CCTV footage has emerged today of the children being esc*rted from the house by police after the arrest of their parents David and Louise Turpin in Perris, California.



The video shows police at the scene after a 17-year-old girl - the eldest daughter - escaped through a window and called police.



Officers esc*rt the youngsters from the home, some of whom can be seen running from the house in which they had been kept chained to their beds and tortured by their parents for years.



Dramatic footage of the rescue mission shows police arriving at the house in multiple squad cars to allow the children to escape years of mistreatment.



They can be seen emerging from the house and running around the family's silver van.



One can be seen carrying another sibling, while another runs from the house in which they were subjected to abuse.



Police were already at the scene as the children flee, and an officer stood on the driveway can be seen ushering them to safety.



Details of their harrowing plight have started to emerge since the California couple pleaded not guilty on Thursday despite evidence of how they allegedly kept their 13 children in locked in their rooms, chained to beds and allowing them to shower no more than once a year.





David Allen Turpin, 57, and his wife Louise Anna Turpin, 49 - who had registered their home as a school - were hit with 12 counts of torture, 12 of false imprisonment, six of child abuse and six of abuse of a dependent adult ahead of their court appearance in the city of Riverside.



The couple arrived in court dressed in black with their hands and legs shackled, and were represented by a public defender.



David Turpin was also charged with committing a lewd act against a child by force or fear or duress, District Attorney Mike Hestrin told a press conference.



The court set bail at $12 million for each of the defendants.



'If convicted of all charges, they face 94 years up to life in prison,' Hestrin told reporters in Riverside.



Sheriff's deputies in Perris, a town southeast of Los Angeles, found three of the captives had been shackled with chains and padlocks in their filthy, foul-smelling home Sunday after receiving an emergency assistance call from their teenage sister who had managed to escape.



Hestrin said the 17-year-old had been working on a plan to escape for more than two years, and took one of her siblings with her, who became frightened and turned back.



The teenager was so emaciated that officers first thought she was a young child.



Officers also initially assumed all the other siblings to be children, but were shocked to discover seven ranging in age from 18 to 29.



All 13 are being treated for malnutrition and undergoing other diagnostic tests.



Hestrin said all the children had been subjected to 'prolonged abuse', were not allowed to shower more than once a year, and barred from seeing a dentist or doctor.



'Circumstantial evidence in the house suggests that the victims were often not released from their chains to go to the bathroom,' he told the press conference.



'If the children were found to wash their hands above the wrist area, they were accused of playing in the water and they would be chained up,' Hestrin said.





When they were not chained up, they were locked in different rooms and were not allowed to have toys, although there were many toys found in the house that were in their original package and had never been opened.



While the children's ordeal began when the family was living in the Fort Worth region of Texas, it 'intensified over time and worsened' when they moved to California.



'They were fed very little, on a schedule,' Hestrin added.



Mark Uffer, chief executive officer at the Corona regional medical center where the adults were being treated, has described their condition as stable.



Neither parent was able to immediately explain why their children were restrained, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.



There was no indication that either suffered from mental illness, Perris police chief Greg Fellows said, or that the children's ordeal was linked to the family's religious beliefs. 



Initial investigations have confirmed that the couple were the biological parents of all 13 siblings.



According to police, the family moved in 2014 from Texas to a middle class neighborhood of Perris, some 70 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, homeschooling their children in their Spanish-style stucco house.



A sister of Louise Turpin, Elizabeth Flores, told ABC the couple kept to themselves.