A DeKalb County woman on Monday pleaded guilty to keeping a disabled man captive in her basement and taking his monthly benefits checks, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Chandra Renee Faust, 44 and widowed, also admitted her guilt to identity fraud, exploitation of a disabled person and two counts each of abuse of a disabled person and theft by taking.
Faust barely could be heard by a DeKalb County prosecutor and a judge as she told of locking Johnny Ray Hill in a room with another disabled man, and supplying them with only a TV, dirty cots, a basin for bathing and a paint bucket for a toilet. The basement prison was discovered after Hill escaped last year, almost five months after he was imprisoned in the room.
Faust was charged only in Hill's imprisonment. The other man, Ben Wheeler, has died, District Attorney Robert James said.
"It is an extremely disturbing case to see what this woman did to them," James said.
Faust gained access to the account in which Hill’s disability checks were deposited and withdrew more than $3,000, which she will have to repay.
The woman's daughter, 18, sat in the courtroom and wept silently. Faust, who also has a son, 4, was immediately taken into custody.
Hill, a former auto detailer, collected $600 a month in disability. Testifying in a previous hearing, he told how he went in and out of hospitals for tuberculosis, osteoarthritis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, broken hips and hypertension.
Treated for a blood clot in his chest in 2009, Hill was living in a homeless shelter in Midtown Atlanta when Faust approached him. She asked him three times if he wanted to rent a room in her Decatur home before he accepted, Hill said.
He lived in one of two rooms in Faust’s basement until water seeped into the space. In September 2009, he was moved into Wheeler's room, and Faust locked and nailed the door shut to keep the men confined.
After hearing Faust’s Cadillac Escalade drive away, Hill picked the lock of one door and he and the other man broke through a second one. A police officer on patrol spotted Hill walking down a street wrapped in a quilt.
“The conditions were deplorable,” Assistant District Attorney Jeanne Canavan said.
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