Turpin Kids
By PAUL J. YOUNG City News Service
RIVERSIDE (CNS) – A Perris man, his wife and their adult daughter who perpetrated sexual, psychological and other abuse on six children placed in their care after being rescued from a home where their natural parents imprisoned them and inflicted trauma that gained international notoriety were sentenced Friday.
“Today’s sentencing marks a significant step in delivering justice to the victims who endured unimaginable abuse,” Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said. “These children were placed in a position of vulnerability after surviving intense trauma, only to be further exploited by someone who was entrusted with their care.”
“We are committed to holding accountable those who prey on innocent children,” he added. “Our office remains steadfast in pursuing justice for all victims of abuse and ensuring that those who violate the trust placed in them are held accountable.”
Marcelino Camacho Olguin, 65, his wife, Rosa Armida Olguin, 60, and their adult daughter, Lennys Giovanna Olguin, 39, reached plea agreements with the District Attorney’s Office last month.
Marcelino Olguin admitted seven counts of lewd acts on a minor and one count of false imprisonment, prompting prosecutors to drop four related charges. During a hearing at the Riverside Hall of Justice Friday, Superior Court Judge Gail O’Rane sentenced the defendant to seven years in state prison, as well as ordered him to register as a sex offender for life under the terms of his parole.
His wife admitted three counts of child abuse and one count each of witness intimidation, grand theft and false imprisonment. Four counts were dropped in her case. The judge imposed a sentence of four years’ felony probation and 120 days in a sheriff’s work release program.
The couple’s daughter admitted three counts of child abuse and one count each of false imprisonment and witness intimidation. Three counts against her were dismissed. O’Rane sentenced the defendant to four years’ probation, with a requirement for 150 days in work release.
Rosa and Lennys Olguin received prison sentences of four years apiece, but those were suspended by the judge under the women’s plea deals.
The Turpin children are suing the county Department of Public Social Services and placement agency ChildNet, also known as Foster Family Network, for putting them in the Olguin’s foster home. The plaintiffs’ attorneys are slated to hold a news briefing outside the Riverside Historic Courthouse Monday to provide an update on the civil suit and share the siblings’ reactions to disposition of the Olguin case.
The defendants were charged in November 2021 following a sheriff’s investigation that was initiated based on the Turpin children’s complaints of repeated abuse in the defendants’ residence.
The victims, almost all of whom are now emancipated young adults, had been in the hostile environment for over two years, placed with the Olguins after their rescue from an oft-described “house of horrors” maintained by their parents, David Turpin, 61, and Louise Turpin, 54, each of whom was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison in 2019 after admitting multiple child cruelty counts.
Attorneys Elan Zektser and Roger Booth are representing different Turpin siblings.
According to Zektser’s complaint, several of the Turpin girls were objects of lascivious attention from Marcelino Olguin, with him “grabbing and fondling (their) buttocks, legs, breasts” and “kissing them on their mouths and making sexually suggestive comments.”
There were instances of the Olguins “pulling their hair, hitting them with a belt and striking their heads,” the complaint stated.
The document recited the following other abuse: “making the plaintiffs sit by themselves, sometimes outside, for many hours at a time”; “making plaintiffs sit in a circle and recount, in detail, the horrors that they had experienced while living with their parents”; “verbally abusing plaintiffs, cursing at them and telling them that they were worthless and should commit suicide”; “forcing them to eat until they began to vomit,” then compelling them “to eat their own vomit.”
The Olguins further told the children that “nobody would ever love them,” Zektser wrote.
In the spring of 2021, the plaintiffs were either placed in alternate foster homes or emancipated.
The whistleblower on the Olguins’ criminal acts was the same one who escaped her parents’ home, by jumping through a window, in January 2018 — now- 22-year-old Jordan Turpin. Her 911 call that she and her 12 siblings were virtually caged in their house on Muir Woods Road led to the brothers and sisters gaining temporary relief — before half of them went to live with the Olguins.
David and Louise Turpin kept some of their children restrained most times of the day, forced them to subsist on peanut butter sandwiches and burritos, made them sleep up to 20 hours daily, and allowed them to shower only once a year. There was also physical abuse that resulted in injuries.
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