Police have arrested a Florida couple who have been accused of torturing, for 10 years, a 15-year-old girl for whom they were the legal guardians.
According to police, officers responded to the victim’s home Wednesday after she wrote to her online instructor, saying that she needed help and asking to have the police sent to her home.
When Margate police officers arrived on the scene, they found that 43-year-old Benjamin Deztuan Lockett had punched the victim in the head because he thought she had eaten candy, which caused her head to smash into the corner of a desk.
The report said that the victim sustained a cut to the left side of her head, which was bleeding and clearly swollen.
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The victim was transported to Broward Health Coral Springs, where additional injuries on the victim’s body were discovered, including “scars consistent with ligature marks, bruising, scar tissue, bite marks from insects, and symptoms of malnutrition.”
According to police, the girl told them that Lockett and Latricia Elizabeth Crawley, 46, who have been her guardians since 2014, have tortured her in a number of ways over the years.
They have also imprisoned her in two separate closets and made her use the bathroom in a bucket.
According to the affidavit, Lockett allegedly gave the victim a permanent scar on her chin when she was eleven years old. In a different incident, the victim, then 13 years old, was allegedly “forced to kneel on rice for several hours at a time, for several days in a row” by Crawley after she had oiled her knees.
The victim’s knees are permanently disfigured.
Crawley allegedly used a hammer to hit the girl’s toes in 2021, and in 2022, the victim was 14 years old; Crawley and Lockett allegedly used a nylon rope to tie the girl to different objects and then threw boiling water at her.
According to the affidavit, the victim said that one form of punishment by Crawley included having her eyes taped shut while her head was dunked into water.
The Florida Department of Children and Families has the girl in protective custody.
According to jail records, Crawley and Lockett were taken into custody on charges of aggravated child abuse and neglect.
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