When the firefighters broke into the number 2 of rue Blake, in the old industrial town of Waterbury in Connecticut, it was a man uniforming barely 30 kilos that they pulled flames. The last time he had been seen outside, he was in CM1 class and no one in the neighborhood expected to see him again one day. On February 17, 2025, when the ambulance was gone to the hospital, the man, now 32, left the family home for the first time in twenty years.
In the emergency artists, then to investigators, he said he was locked up at 12 in a tiny room of 2.7 meters by 2.4. He will also say that he had set fire to the floor, using a forgotten lighter in the pocket of an old jacket that his mother-in-law had given him: if he did not die in the fire, he might be released.
At the end of March, Kimberly Sullivan, the survivor’s mother-in-law, aged 57, was charged with kidnapping, aggression, cruelty, forcibleness and endangering the life of others. If she is found guilty of all accusations, she risks life prison. She, pleads not guilty, and accuses the biological father, Kregg Sullivan, who died last January.
In an arrest warrant against Kimberly Sullivan, the man, who retains anonymity and now benefits from the accompaniment of a tutor, said that his mother-in-law and his father prohibited him from having friends and getting out of the house: “I was kept secret all my life”he told the police.
The forgotten child
Years before his disappearance, teachers, classmates and neighbors were already concerned about the situation, and the police had been alerted for mistreatment, while the one who was then only a young child disputed their classmates with their meals and seemed to have to excavate the trash cans to eat, drinking the water from the school. According to the New York Times, the authorities had concluded that the child was fine. In 2005, he was withdrawn from the school, to be “Schooking at home”. Since then, nothing. Only the two younger girls of Kimberly Sullivan, now aged 27 and 29, seemed to come and come freely in the house and outside.
Once only, the young boy tried to flee, breaking the door of his room to go to the kitchen and look for food. After that, the door of his cell was reinforced with plywood, he told investigators. His only authorized outing, lasting one hour, consisted in performing household chores in the house. In the police, he reported that his confinement became almost total after the death of his father.
The years passing and the neighbors succeeded, the Sullivan family ended up passing for a family of four people. “I never knew that there was a boy in this house”said Goodwin Lowe, 73, living in the vicinity since 2008. For decades, Heather Tessman, the half-sister of the man on rue Blake, had sought in vain for this brother whom she had only seen once, when he was 3 years old, and she 6.
Given to adoption before the birth of her half-brother, she grew up in another family. The biological mother of the two children, Tracy Vallerand, had subsequently entrusted her son’s custody to her ex-husband, wishing her a better life. At the time of their separation, Kregg Sullivan had not informed him of the place where he moved. It was on the video of the shiny camera, during her rescue, that she saw her son again for the first time.
Today, the survivor of rue Blake is hospitalized in a rehabilitation center and benefits from a physical rehabilitation program and psychological support.
