People Rescued From Philly Basement Speak.
From
Sarah Hoye, CNN
updated 7:01 AM EST, Tue October 18, 2011
4 disabled adults locked in basement.
Philadelphia (CNN) -- Three of the four mentally disabled people recently rescued from a dingy, urine-scented basement boiler room spoke about their harrowing experience locked in what some in the media have dubbed the dungeon of horrors.
"That was real dirty of you. That was wrong," a tearful Derwin McLemire told CNN affiliate KYW Monday.
McLemire was one of four people found locked in a sub-basement room Saturday, with no food and only a bucket for a toilet, police said. The pitch-black, 15-foot-by-6-foot space houses what police described as a boiler used to heat the building. A penetrating stench of urine and feces still hung in the chamber days after the discovery. McLemire was found chained to the boiler, authorities said.
The alleged victims said they were beaten and were afraid of the suspects in the case.
Tamara Breeden told KYW one suspect, Linda Ann Weston, hit her in the head, "and all this was bleeding and everything."
The three suspects -- Gregory Thomas, 47, Eddie Wright, 49, and Weston, 51 -- face charges including criminal conspiracy, aggravated assault, kidnapping, criminal trespass, unlawful restraint and false imprisonment, Philadelphia police said Sunday. Police said they were investigating whether the victims' Social Security checks had been stolen, as well as several other leads.
McLemire, Breeden and a third man, Herbert Knowles, told KYW their Social Security information was taken from them.
Bond for each of the three suspects was set at $2.5 million, according to the Philadelphia district attorney's office. The FBI joined the probe after detectives discovered one of the accused had traveled to at least two other states with the people found in the basement of the northeast Philadelphia apartment building, police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers said.
McLemire, who said he is from North Carolina, said once he attempted to escape from a home of Weston's, "and I didn't get away, so they got me."
Authorities were still trying to unravel the shocking details about the case.
Police found identification documents for dozens of people when they arrested Weston, who served eight years in prison for killing her sister's boyfriend in the early 1980s, said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. In that case, the victim "was held captive for an extended period of time, locked in a closet and he literally starved to death," Ramsey said.
"That concerns us because obviously, she's capable of quite a bit of a lot of different things," he said.
And Weston is believed to have been in McLean, Texas, with some or all of the alleged captives. They then traveled to Florida and Philadelphia, Evers said. All seven had been traveling together, Evers said, but he did not know for how long.
Police departments as far away as Florida are looking into possible connections between the Philadelphia captives and missing persons cases in their towns. Chase Scott, a West Palm Beach police spokesman, said a 15-year-old girl listed as an endangered runaway since July was last seen in the company of Thomas' teenage son there.
Scott told CNN that Thomas was arrested in West Palm Beach on a burglary charge in July and was a suspect in a grand theft case later that month. Authorities initially identified Gregory Thomas as Thomas Gregory, and later corrected the name.
A preliminary hearing on the charges and evidence in the case was set for October 24. No pleas were entered on Monday, with that to happen at a formal arraignment at a date yet to be set.
The building's owner, Turgut Gozleveli, discovered the four captives after being informed that people were milling in and out of his basement, where no one was supposed to be. Gozleveli said he checked out the basement Thursday and found a few things out of place, but no people. On Friday, he found a dog dish and thought one of his tenants was attempting to conceal a pet.
On Saturday, after hearing a dog barking, he went to the building's sub-basement and found a door chained shut. After removing the chain and going inside, he found the four.
The alleged victims were brought out on stretchers, said Danyell Tisdale, the block captain who notified Gozleveli. She said she was concerned about some of the things she'd seen recently, including people being brought in from the back of a sport utility vehicle with out-of-state plates.
"I hope I did enough," she said. "I called."