Principal of severely malnourished boy held captive for decades raised red flags years ago

An elementary school raised countless red flags about the severely emaciated man who went on to spend decades in captivity in a Connecticut house of horrors — but “not a damn thing was done” as he dropped off the face of the Earth, the former principal claimed.

The victim, now 32, weighed just 68 pounds when he was rescued last month from a Waterbury house fire that he told cops he deliberately lit to escape the hellish conditions he’d allegedly been forced to endure since he was 11 years old, authorities revealed Wednesday.

Tom Pannone, who was the boy’s principal at Barnard Elementary School two decades ago, told NBC Connecticut that he always knew something was “grossly wrong” after staffers first spotted the worryingly thin child stealing food and eating out of the garbage.

“Everyone really was concerned with this child since he was 5 years old. You knew something was wrong. It was grossly wrong,” Pannone said.

“We knew it. We reported it. Not a damn thing was done. That’s the tragedy of the whole thing.”

The principal said the school made at least 20 calls to child services and the boy’s stepmom, Kimberly Sullivan, before he was suddenly yanked out of class — never to return again.

Sullivan, 56, was arrested and charged with cruelty and kidnapping Wednesday after an investigation in the wake of last month’s fire uncovered the shocking alleged abuse that authorities have described as “something out of a horror movie.”

“You don’t disappear off the face of the Earth at 10 years old,” Pannone said of the boy’s sudden disappearance years earlier.

Pannone said the school started raising concerns when the boy told staffers he sometimes wasn’t allowed food at home — and teachers even started bringing him food after seeing him eating from the trash.

The boy recently told cops he was eventually pulled out of school in the fourth grade after staffers started alerting Department of Children and Families, authorities said.

“[The victim] stated that by this time in his life he was always hungry so when he was at school he would ask others for their food, steal others’ food and sometimes eat food out of the garbage. This resulted in DCF responding to the home on two occasions,” the stepmom’s criminal complaint states.

At the time, Sullivan allegedly told the boy to tell authorities “everything was fine.”

He was allegedly pulled out of the school by the stepmom shortly after, according to authorities.

Pannone said he was told the boy had been enrolled in nearby Wolcott Public Schools, but he could never find a record of it.

He was told, too, at one point that the student was now being homeschooled.

The victim, however, told investigators that he was locked in a room at the home and “no one was teaching him anything,” the complaint states.

“[The boy] stated that once he was pulled from school his weekday routine and captivity became brutally
consistent for the rest of his life,” the filing charges.

The explosive details only emerged after cops started probing the case after pulling the now-32-year-old man from the house fire back on Feb. 17.

While being treated for smoke inhalation, he had revealed that he intentionally set the blaze, cops said.

“I wanted my freedom,” the man said, according to police.

The investigation revealed the man “had been held in captivity for over 20 years, enduring prolonged abuse, starvation, severe neglect, and inhumane treatment,” police said.

Sullivan was charged with assault, kidnapping, unlawful restraint, cruelty and reckless endangerment. She was arraigned Wednesday and held in lieu of $300,000 bond.