They endured medieval-like conditions, were kept in a dungeon, and treated “worse than prisoners of war,” prosecutors said of the five adopted children of Charles and Matthew Edmondson.
The Ohio couple was sentenced last Friday after they accepted plea deals on charges including child endangerment, felonious assault and kidnapping. Charles Edmondson, 64, will serve a minimum of 15 years in prison; his wife, Matthew, will spend at least the next 13 years behind bars. Prosecutors moved to dismiss another 48 counts against Charles Edmonson and 44 additional counts against Matthew Edmonson as part of the deal.
“Your honor, I’m here in front of you because I believe God has a purpose for me,” Matthew Edmonson said Friday. “I know it’s taken a lot of mistakes to be here, and I’m now seeing the bigger picture. I want to end the negative cycle. I want my sons to receive psychological and emotional healing. I’m truly sorry.”
Bailey Edmonson, a biological son of the couple, was also sentenced Friday, receiving two years’ probation after pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of child endangering, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer.
The five adopted sons, four of which had special needs, endured a nightmarish existence, often being deprived of food and water.
Investigators indicted the couple in June following a separate probe into Charles Edmondson, which found him guilty of sexually assaulting another of his adopted sons, an adult at the time.
Clermont County prosecuting attorney Mark J. Tekulve previously said investigators found more evidence of “severe mental and physical abuse” that led to additional indictments against the Edmondsons.
The five boys are biological brothers.
Prosecutors outlined the various “punishments” they endured in an August court filing. They were often placed in a basement room, naked, with nothing but a steel-framed bunk bed, usually without a mattress or blanket. They’d usually be kept there all night, clinging to each other for warmth.
“The videos of these undernourished and naked children huddled up in a locked room in the basement, on the stone-cold basement floor like a pile of puppies trying to stay together to keep warm, are nothing short of gut-wrenching,” Tekulve said in a statement in June.
Photos from surveillance cameras installed in the home showed one of the children tied to a bed in the basement. They had limited access to water, and food was often denied them as punishment.
The children often complained of being hungry; one was found scavenging food out of the trash at school. Another told school officials that urine and feces were rubbed into his eyes as a punishment.
“These two are unfit to be parents, and I am grateful to those who have worked tirelessly to make sure they will not be,” Tekulve said. “Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time and will not be the last time that my office has had to seek indictment for people like this who pretend to be ‘parents.’”
Prosecutors said the boys, four of whom have a genetic condition associated with intellectual and developmental problems, were under constant video surveillance throughout the house, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
The abuse started when the youngest boys were about 3 years old and continued for more than five years. The brothers were 13, 11 and 8-year-old triplets when removed from the Edmondson’s home in February, five years after they were adopted. Prosecutors allege the abuse started the summer before that, in July 2018, when the couple were fostering the boys.
Each “will require years if not a lifetime of psychiatric treatment,” prosecutors said in court filings.
