Former Georgia Tech football player Recardo Wimbush, 35, and his wife Therian Wimbush, 39, have been found guilty of second-degree child cruelty. The Wimbushes kept their oldest son in a tiny basement room for 18 months and did not seek medical attention for a younger son who had a malignant skin tumor that one witness described as the size of an adult fist.
The Wimbushes, who did not show visible reactions to their conviction, were also found not guilty on charges of first-degree child cruelty.
The three charges they were found guilty on each carry a one- to 10-year sentence. When sentencing occurs on Monday, Jan. 30, Judge Deborah Fluker could sentence them to up to 30 years in prison.
The Wimbushes never disputed that they kept their oldest son in the basement for a year and a half, or that they did not seek medical attention for the younger son’s malignant cancer. They maintained that it was their son’s idea to live in the basement as a punishment for lying and taking things without permission.
The couple, who served as their own attorneys, also did not dispute that the children did not go to the doctor regularly. In her closing statement, Therian Wimbush said the tumor had just been a “small bump” when the child was in her custody and that her son never seemed ill.
The AJC is not identifying any of the 10 Wimbush children by name because they are juveniles and two are victims of abuse.
In his closing argument, Gwinnett County Assistant District Attorney Dan Mayfield called both the Wimbushes and their crimes “evil.” He described a house where the older son lived in fear of his parents and was largely closed off from the outside world. The children were homeschooled and did not interact with many people outside of the family.
At one point, the then-13-year-old boy escaped the basement and ran away, giving a police officer fake names and dates of birth and claiming to have been living on the street for weeks before admitting who he was. Not long after he returned home, a lock was put on the basement door.
Therian Wimbush, in her closing statement, painted the older son as a “perfect child” who was also excessively prideful, deceitful and lacking in remorse.
Half the jury wanted to convict the Wimbushes on the first-degree child cruelty charges as well, said jury foreman Bill Rice. The other half did not believe the parents acted with malice, which is required to convict on a first-degree charge.
Rice said he believed they should have been convicted on the first-degree charges as well because he did not see any indication that the Wimbushes would allow their son to leave the basement “any time soon.”
“The fact that she took the light bulb out of that closet, the fact that she put a pee jar in there for him to go to the bathroom, told me that he was not going to be in there for another day or another week, but this was going to be the routine for that child for a very long period of time,” Rice said, his voice cracking with emotion.
After Therian Wimbush and Recardo Wimbush were arrested in 2014, a pediatrician found the older son had bone loss, vitamin D deficiency and a fungal rash —all uncommon in juveniles, the doctor testified, but issues that may be attributed to the boy’s year-and-a-half confinement to a humid room the size of a twin bed with limited light and no change of clothes.
A pediatric oncologist who examined the younger son shortly after the Wimbushes' arrest testified earlier in the trial that the boy's tumor was the "most extensive" he'd ever seen as a physician. Dr. Louis Rapkin said the type of tumor the boy had, a giant-cell fibroblastoma, was slow-growing and would typically take "years" to reach the size it did.
Many of the jurors lost sleep over the case and had an emotional reaction to it, Rice said.
“It was emotional for all of us. The pain that those children went through is what no child should go through,” Rice said. “It’s going to affect them for the rest of their life no matter what care comes now.“
The Wimbushes’ 10 children are currently split up, with some in foster care and some with extended family. Mayfield said they have been making “remarkable” progress. They are attending public school and getting “As and Bs” on their report cards, they testified Wednesday.
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