Tortured Teen Testimony Released

A 16-year-old allegedly tortured for a year inside a Tracy home told a grand jury that he escaped because his captors talked about killing him and dumping his body in the Delta.

Afraid for his life, the boy — called Kyle in court papers — fled the Tennis Lane home on Dec. 1 by unlocking himself from the fireplace to which he was chained and using a trampoline to hop over the backyard wall. He then limped across an adjacent parking lot and into the lobby of a sports club, where employees called police for help.

After he heard his alleged captors talking on speakerphone about how they planned to cut off his fingers with a meat cleaver, Kyle said he knew then that he had to find a way out.

“I had to hurry up and leave or it was just going to be the end from there,” he said in a newly unsealed 928-page transcript of a grand jury hearing that led to a slew of indictments against the four adults accused of imprisoning Kyle.

Husband and wife Michael Schumacher and Kelly Lau were arrested in December along with next-door neighbor Anthony Waiters and a woman named Carén Ramirez who called herself Kyle’s mom. Police said they starved, drugged and beat the boy for as many as 18 months after he fled a Sacramento group home in spring 2007.

The four could spend life in prison if found guilty of the several charges of torture, kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault with caustic chemicals and other forms of abuse. All except Schumacher pleaded not guilty to all charges. He has yet to enter a plea. The four are due in court again on June 18.

Kyle told the grand jury that the abuse escalated from slapping and punching to slicing flesh and drawing blood for offenses as minor as forgetting to feed the dog or for taking food to slake his hunger.

Waiters once sliced Kyle’s arm with a steak knife, Kyle said. Ramirez held his arm down and Kyle screamed, the boy alleged. Kyle said that afterwards, the pair poured bleach on his cuts and doctored them with salt and butter before wrapping his arm in a paper towel.

Other times, Ramirez, Lau and Waiters would stick an aluminum baseball bat into the fireplace and brand Kyle’s back, the teen said.

“Carén and Kelly came up with the idea of, like, heating the bat up, and then I guess they started branding me with the bat,” Kyle said.

The boy said Schumacher would sometimes punch him in the face until he passed out. Kyle also said he was chained to the fireplace, where he was forced to sleep most nights.

Lau used a belt once to choke him until he lost consciousness, Kyle said. She allegedly strapped a belt around his neck and buckled it. He dropped to the fireplace hearth and his arm fell on the grate while the fire blazed, he said.

“When I first woke up, I didn’t know what happened or anything,” he said. “So then I immediately noticed my arm was, like, discolored and everything, and I was, like, really freaking out, and at first I didn’t feel anything.”

To treat the burn, Kyle said Ramirez would just pour bleach on it. His wounds scabbed over and became infected.

The boy said he never saw a physician and had been kept out of school since the eighth grade.

He said he hasn’t seen his mother, Susan Barnett, since he was about 8 years old, when Ramirez somehow obtained custody of him and his brother. Barnett has since died.

Kyle said Ramirez talked him into running away from a Sacramento foster home. He wound up living with her and a woman named Catherine Cockrell in Pleasanton. Cockrell introduced Ramirez to Lau and Schumacher, who opened up their home to the pair in July 2007.

From there, Kyle recounts horrific abuse. He said the family forced him to do all the chores and make him kneel for hours on the floor until his knees hurt. He said he was hit constantly and never got to shower. The family, he said, would rarely call him by his real name, and Ramirez, he added, would refer to him as “Iggit.”

Kyle was allegedly abused nearly every day until he bled, and that’s the only reason he ever got new clothes, he said.

Sometime in fall 2008, Lau poured him a cup of “Red Hot Damn,” a spicy cinnamon liquor, said Waiters’ niece, Chelsea Waiters, 16. She said Kyle drank it, got sick and vomited. Lau then screamed at him, Chelsea told grand jurors.

At other times, the adults would force him to chew marijuana and make him drink liquor, the boy said.

The four Schumacher children, ages 1 through 9, said they understood that what was happening to Kyle was “bad,” but they didn’t want to tell anyone. The oldest child said she actually liked that Kyle lived with her family because he would hang out with her and help her with homework.

Grand jurors also interviewed detectives, friends and family of both the victim and the suspects and neighbors.