Hostage family may have had 2nd home

Raymond Daniel Thurmond remains in jail, and police remain busy checking the past of the North Georgia man they believe held his wife and four children hostage in a mobile home for nearly three years.

Authorities are looking into reports that he may have held the family in comparable dreadful conditions before moving them into a trailer in Lavonia, said Lavonia police Chief Bruce Carlisle. Lavonia is in Franklin County, about 90 miles northeast of Atlanta.

“We understand that that residence was in the same condition —- maybe worse, if that’s possible —- than this one” that police recently discovered, Carlisle said.

According to police, Thurmond had kept his family living in squalor in a trailer at the Beaver Creek Mobile Home Community since late August 2005. Thurmond, his wife and children ages 14, 13, 12 and 9, lived in a trailer at the rear of the park. Residents said they never saw anyone but Thurmond at the trailer. Police allege he kept the wife and children locked inside the trailer, its windows closed and covered.

Police arrested Thurmond Tuesday, a few days after his wife and children escaped from the trailer to seek help. The wife, they said, worked up the nerve to leave after Thurmond got a girlfriend.

Officers charged him with one count of rape, four counts of first-degree child abuse and five counts of false imprisonment. Investigators have not named the mother, because she is the victim of alleged sexual assault. She is undergoing psychiatric evaluation, said police, who have not charged her.

Police have not named the children —- three boys and a girl —- because they are minors.

Thurmond, who is in the Franklin County Detention Center awaiting a bond hearing, has requested a court-appointed lawyer.

Thurmond will not have a bond hearing until he has a lawyer, said Bob Lavendar, district attorney for the Northern Judicial District of Georgia, which includes Franklin County. Lavendar said he plans to talk today with Lavonia police about the case.

The case has caused a sensation locally, across the state, nation and overseas. Police say the four children are small for their age, underfed, pale and barely educated. None went to school for at least the past three years, they said. They spent their days watching television, police allege.

Investigators were appalled at the condition of the trailer when investigators entered it Aug. 7. Detectives reported rotting food, mounds of trash, discarded food containers and discarded paper everywhere. The trailer, in the Beaver Creek Mobile Home Community, swarmed with roaches, they said. The trailer was so filthy, so full, that officers filled two Dumpsters with trash they took from the trailer.

The mother and children are at a shelter, Carlisle said.

The state Division of Family and Children Services, which often investigates cases of reputed child neglect, said it has not been asked to review the Thurmond case.