Were they renting their home or did they own it. If it was a rental didn’t the landlord inspect the house at all during that time?
Looking on YT for the dancing video I came across a French video which didn’t blur the kids’ faces at all. They were posed smiling with Elvis. They all look very young.
You can’t just come in and “inspect” rental property without an invitation from the tenants.
As Sue22 experienced, it’s easy to find unblurred pics of the family. Their social media accounts were “cloned” when the story broke, so it was easy to see them. Some news media saw no need to blur given that. Others still did. Yet others blurred the pics of the kids under 18 but not those of adults.
@Nrdsb4 Many leases give the landlord the right to come in and inspect rental property. Sometimes conditions are imposed on this right, e.g., 48 hours notice.
^^^^Right, we are in the process of leasing a residential home that we have purchased and have been studying the proposed rental contract carefully. The landlord isn’t just going to show up unannounced and enter the property. The insinuation that a landlord should have picked up on what was happening was unreasonable. These people didn’t get away with this for years by being stupid.
Not unless there is some sort of problem requiring immediate action. How long had they been in the California house?
"Nrdsb4: You can’t just come in and “inspect” rental property without an invitation from the tenants. "
This is not true. A landlord can come in with 24 hour notice (in most jurisdictions) for legitimate reasons, such as to inspect an HVAC system. The landlord does not need permission, but must give notice. He can go in without notice in what could reasonably be deemed an emergency, for example, hearing or seeing water running. (Landlord for many years)
^^^^Point being that “notice” is required. I guess “permission” was a bad choice of words.
Whenever something like this happens, people look for things or people to blame for how it can go unchecked for so long. A landlord should fall way way down the road if we are looking for the weak links in the chain of circumstances that allowed this situation to deteriorate over the years.
Tenant-landlord laws are very state-specific. WA is very pro-tenant. LL can get in a lot of hot water if it can be shown that “inspections” were unreasonable and just to harass the tenant. We have a cat rescued from a hoarder’s house (not shown in my avatar). Only when the renter stopped paying his rent and replying to the LL requests the LL called the police to check on the property. On the outside, the house looked well taken care of. On the inside, there were 20+ cats, all white and seriously inbred, and the products of their metabolism. The renter was MIA for many days. No animal cruelty charges could be brought against him because he did not leave the animals without food and water and there was no way to prove that he would not return. He bought several mega-bags of food, scattered it around the house, filled the tubs with water and left a tap running. I felt very sorry for the LL in that situation. He was the proverbial bag holder.
^^^^^Yikes.
I am not blaming the landlord, but when we had our rental house the management company had it in the lease that they would inspect the house once a year around the anniversary date. Also, we had a pest company do annual termite inspections. They had to give the tenants notice, but that was no big deal.
I wonder if the landlord knew of the 13 children in the house?
Ok, so the landlord gives this family his 24 hour notice or whatever and comes over to “inspect” the house. Well, the kids are all clean, wearing their cutesie matching outfits, etc. What is the hoped for outcome of this inspection? If the landlord doesn’t know there are 13 kids living there, that’s just another excursion en masse in order to avoid detection. I just don’t see what a landlord could have been reasonably expected to discover when this family had blood relatives that couldn’t see it.
Just because the landlord could inspect the house does not necessarily mean that s/he will. (Is it known whether the Turpins were renting?)
Aren’t property records public? If one knows the address, it could be easily determined who the owner is (unless the owner is like Bezos and holds his houses in trusts and LLCs).
The house reeked and contained human waste. It would be difficult to clean all of that in 24 or 48 hours. The blood relatives were never allowed in the house.
Of course it isn’t the landlord’s responsibility to inspect. With good tenants who pay on time, you only go in once a year for maintenance, at least in my experience. Anything could be hidden with notice, I suppose. I seriously doubt the landlord rented to a family with 13 children (if the house was rented - not sure). Very few tenants would be forthcoming about that information and almost all landlords check references to see that information offered is what is actually true.
What I’m curious about is family. Did the extended family never EVER see these kids? Not visit for birthdays, Christmas…nothing? Did they not find that odd? That’s what confuses me.
^^^ @TranquilMind don’t forget that the extended family lived many states away, and appear not to be people of means. Distance and money keep many families apart, even healthy and sane ones… And here, you have a history of estrangement and conflict.
did you see the article today about the ex classmate (now an adult) of one of the older girls saying how guilty he feels because they teased her because she smelled so bad. The sad thing is it does not sound like the school looked in to why a child was coming to school dirty and smelling like poo.
She was bullied because of extreme lack of hygiene and in three years no one in the public school bothered to report it. This really bothers me. The adults that were supposed to notice and report these things failed to do so. The classmates noticed and remembered all these years so it had to be pretty bad.
I agree @3scoutsmom – a child smells of feces and that’s not reported?