A Gwinnett County judge on Thursday granted a Buford couple the right to receive letters from their 10 children eight months after they were placed in foster care in a bizarre child-abuse case.
Recardo and Therian Wimbush have been in jail since June after police and social workers said they discovered their eldest child — now 14— had been imprisoned in a small basement room for more than a year.
The Wimbushes, who home-schooled their children and raised a close-knit family, are asking the court to transfer custody of the children to relatives. They say they were raising their children in line with their strict religious beliefs.
“This is a family that was together 24-7,” said Natalie Green, a lawyer representing Recardo. “They’ve been completely shut out from having any information about the children.”
Juvenile CourtJudge Robert Rodatus postponed the custody hearing until March 19 but agreed that social workers should turn over the letters to the parents, some of which had been written months ago.
The Wimbush case surprised many because Recardo Wimbush was a former football star and team captain at Georgia Tech and Therian Wimbush had degrees from Spelman College and Georgia Tech.
The two married in college where they had started their family.Friends and former classmates saw them as kid-crazy and devoted parents with good character. The children were home-schooled in the Buford home by Therian, who was also professionally tutoring other children. Recardo earned his degree from Georgia Tech and worked for a railroad company.
Now they are both charged with malicious child cruelty, a felony, because of their alleged social isolation of their eldest child. While the charges only involve one child, the court ordered all the children removed and the Wimbushes held without bail.
Dan Mayfield, a chief deputy prosecutor, and a judge at hearings last summer cited concerns the children's loyalty to their parents represented a form of "Stockholm syndrome" in which hostages bond with captors and voiced concerns that the parents could taint the investigation if they could get access to their children.
Green and Alex Manning, a lawyer representing Therian Wimbush, described the children as cheerful with well developed personalities and intelligence as evidence that the charges of abuse are overblown.
“These are special children, phenomenal children,” Manning said. “Our clients would like to lay eyes on them.”
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