'Starving' Twins Testify Against Mother Who Restrained, Tortured Them: 'Told Us to Stop Calling Her Mom'

Nearly three years after twin teenagers went door-to-door overnight in a Texas town claiming they'd been restrained, starved, and tortured, their mother was convicted. Harris County jurors returned their verdict on two counts of aggravated assault resulting in serious bodily injury in just one hour after the twins testified.

Sentencing for Zaikiya Duncan, 43, is set for later today, just one week shy of it being exactly three years after the day the Harris County Sheriff's Office responded to a welfare check request on two 15-year-old teens who told a neighbor they'd just "escaped from their mother's house," per a probable cause affidavit cited by Law&Crime.

"The twin siblings were covered with bruises, were barefoot, and were partially clothed," notes the affidavit, when police arrived at approximately 5:30 a.m. on October 18, 2022. They also "stated that they were starving." Police noted that the children each had wrist "lacerations consistent with being restrained with handcuffs," seemingly corroborating their story.

In court last week, the now 18-year-old twins testified against their mother, though both stated that they still loved her. The daughter spoke barely above a whisper, according to the Houston Chronicle, reportedly unable to even say that she resented her mother.

She said that she decided to escape with her brother because she was tired of "being locked up and getting beat," according to the Chronicle. Her brother went into more explicit detail of the alleged abuses they claimed to have suffered when he reached the stand.

"She told us to stop calling her mom," he said, per the newspaper, and said they were confined to a laundry room with handcuffs and given nothing but trash bags to wear for months on end. He told the court he believed their mother "hated" them, per Law&Crime.

When it came to eating and drinking, the boy said their only option was a "cocktail of water, bleach and their own urine from a mop bucket" to drink, while food was "thrown to the floor and sometimes splashed with bleach," per the paper.

The boy claimed that their mother once sprayed oven cleaner in their mouths and tightened their handcuffs after she discovered they'd escaped and were digging for food in the neighbors' garbage cans. The twins were under constant camera surveillance in the laundry room.

The neighbor who responded to the teens' initial plea for help in 2022 captured the moment on their doorbell footage, which showed the children partially dressed and asking, "Can you help us?" as they held up the handcuffs they claimed to have escaped from. The brother was shirtless while his sister was wearing a "gray plastic grocery bag around her neck that she stated she used as a shirt," per the report.

The neighbor spoke with ABC affiliate KVII after the incident and recalled the kids coming inside and assuring her, "We are not here to hurt you." She said the sister "was shaking with her handcuffs. She was like, 'We are looking for help. We just need help. We just broke out of our handcuffs. Our mom had us handcuffed in the laundry room.'"

They said they hadn't eaten in a week and claimed "their mom kept them locked in the laundry room, naked, zip-tied from the ankles and handcuffed from the wrists," added the woman, an ICU nurse, who took photos of the cuts on their wrists from the handcuffs and shared them with the outlet.

The affidavit went on to detail some of the abuses the teens alleged they were forced to endure at the hands of their mother and her boyfriend Jova Terrell, 30. Duncan's then-boyfriend has already pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of endangering a child last year, per Law&Crime, and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.

In their report, police stated that the boy twin's wrist had blisters that were bleeding and his hands were swollen, while his sister had similar injuries to her own hands and wrists. This was consistent with their story of being "handcuffed to the same black dolly located in the laundry room of the residence."

"Both complainants informed deputies that their [mother] made them drink chemicals such as bleach [and] Lysol and would spray "Easy-Off" oven cleaner in their mouths if they talked too much," the report stated. "The defendant would also pour bleach on the children causing their skin to burn, including their genital area."

The children could not recall their last shower, stating that they only had "access to a mop bucket containing dirty water and when they needed to use the restroom, they would have to urinate/defecate on themselves." Further, the sister recalled one instance where her brother had "defecated" and their mother allegedly "made them both eat it and drink [his] urine."

The twins claimed they were only feed a mustard or relish sandwich one to three times a week and got water to drink through the valve on the washing machine. They further alleged their mother would regularly make them take Benadryl to make them sleep, with the boy claiming at one time he was given 24 tablets, prompting a seizure.

Their escape was allegedly facilitated when the twins, cuffed back-to-back together, per their testimony, were able to make their way out of the laundry room and found their mother's purse. The brother was able to get the handcuff key from inside it and hide it under his tongue.

When police tracked down the twins' house -- they had only recently moved to the area and no longer knew where it was after knocking on multiple neighbor doors -- both Duncan and Terrell were nowhere to be found, and neither were Duncan's other five children.

An Amber Alert was issued for the parents and they were ultimately apprehended in Louisiana. The other five children were "deemed safe" and placed in Child Protective Service custody. CPS in Texas told authorities they had not had contact with the family, but Louisiana was familiar with them.

In court, prosecutors pulled old records that showed Duncan had previously been accused of abusing the twins in Louisiana in 2012, when they were five years old, with the Chronicle saying they had six pages of similar allegations of spraying chemicals into the mouths of her children and forcing them to drink bleach a decade before the family moved to Texas.