NEW ORLEANS, LA — Five Louisiana residents are charged with felonies for caging a 22-year-old autistic woman in the backyard, forcing her into labor and abusing her in a litany of ways, including forcing her to eat her dead mother’s ashes as they stood nearby and laughed, according to a federal indictment. The five were arrested two years ago on state charges related to the case.
Federal prosecutors allege the abuse occurred over a period from August 2015 to June 2016, when the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office received a complaint. The defendants had lived with the victim and her mother in Kentwood, Louisiana, until the the mother died in 2015, then moved to a mobile home in Amite, Louisiana, according to the complaint.
When authorities raided the property, the victim was placed in the protective custody by the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
The woman was a relative of Raylaine Knope, 42, according to prosecutors. She and her husband, Terry Knope II, 45, planned to force the victim into prostitution and both face a sex-trafficking charge, according to an indictment.
Terry Knope has also been charged with a hate crime. Prosecutors said the injuries he’s accused of inflicting on the victim were motivated by a hate crime, and he also is charged with theft of government funds — the more than $8,700 in Social Security benefits that were meant for the victims.
Terry and Raylaine Knope are also are charged with labor and housing law violations, along with Terry Knope’s 20-year-old daughter, Taylor Knope, and Raylaine Knope’s 23-year-old son, Terry Lambert.
If convicted, all four could be imprisoned for life.
The fifth person charged Bridget Lambert, Raylaine Knope’s daughter, who was charged with forced labor conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
The complaint (embedded below) offers a glimpse of the heinous abuse allegedly inflicted on the woman, who was repeatedly kicked and hit if she refused and threatened with serious harm death if she tried to escape.
She was initially allowed to sleep on a mattress on the floor of the family’s mobile home, according to the complaint, but was soon sent to the backyard to sleep in a tent and later, a shed. When she tried to escape, she was forced to live in the backyard in a cage made of chicken wire and covered with a plastic tarp and tree branches, according to the complaint.
Among the other allegations:
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