She was a teenager who thought calling 911 would finally save her family. Instead, the girl who slipped out of a filthy California house and freed her siblings from torture says the system that stepped in next left her bruised in a different way. After surviving a childhood of starvation, shackles, and isolation, she now describes foster care as another maze of fear, broken promises, and adults who saw her more as a paycheck than a person.
Her story sits at the center of the Turpin case, in which thirteen siblings were rescued after years of abuse by their parents. The escape was supposed to mark the start of safety and stability. What followed, according to the young woman and several of her brothers and sisters, was a second round of trauma inside the very network that was meant to protect them.
The escape that shocked the country
The girl who made that desperate call is Jordan Turpin, one of thirteen children of David and Louise Turpin in Riverside County, California. As she has recounted in interviews, Jordan climbed out a window with a deactivated cell phone, then used it to dial 911 and describe a home where siblings were chained to beds, denied food, and rarely allowed to bathe. Investigators later found the Turpin children, ranging in age from 2 to 29, in a house that neighbors barely knew was occupied, a setting that has since been described as a “house of horrors” and chronicled in detail by court records.
Jordan and two of her siblings have since spoken publicly about that day and the years that led up to it. In a televised special, the three described how their parents controlled everything from meals to schooling, with some of the older children barely able to recite basic information about their own lives. Jordan told viewers she believed that if she failed to get help, at least one of her siblings would die, a claim echoed in a later profile that framed her as the driving force behind the family’s rescue. For a time, the narrative seemed clear: a brave teenager, a dramatic escape, and a system finally stepping in.
From house of horrors to foster care failures
Once the children were removed from their parents, Riverside County officials placed several of them in foster homes. On paper, that move looked like the standard path toward healing. In reality, multiple Turpin siblings say they traded one set of abusers for another. Court filings and interviews describe foster parents who restricted food, used physical punishment, and controlled the siblings’ movements in ways that echoed the very captivity they had just escaped. One attorney who represents several of the children has said publicly that some of the foster environments were so harmful that his clients now speak of foster care as a continuation of their original nightmare, a claim that has been detailed in legal interviews.
The most serious allegations center on one foster family that took in multiple Turpin children. According to a summary of criminal proceedings, those foster parents were later sentenced on child abuse charges tied directly to their treatment of the siblings. A legal analysis of the case describes how the adults were accused of exploiting the children financially and emotionally while presenting themselves as rescuers, behavior that eventually led to criminal convictions. For the young woman who first called 911, the message was devastating: the badge of “foster parent” did not guarantee safety, and the oversight she had been told to trust did not catch the warning signs quickly enough.
Money, oversight, and a system that missed the warning signs
The fallout has not been limited to criminal courtrooms. Riverside County has agreed to pay significant settlements to some of the Turpin siblings who were placed in abusive foster homes. One agreement reached with a county agency totals 13.5 million dollars, according to a detailed report on the civil settlement. In a separate arrangement, county officials approved payments to Turpin children who alleged that social workers and contractors failed to monitor their placements, leaving them exposed to new abuse even after the world had already seen what they had survived in their parents’ home. Another account of the litigation describes how the county’s insurer will fund a 15 million dollar payout that covers several of the siblings’ claims about their treatment in foster care, a figure that has been cited in coverage of the Riverside County settlements.
Those numbers are stark, but for the young woman at the center of the story, they are also abstract. In on-camera conversations, Jordan has talked less about money and more about the daily reality of trying to trust adults again. In a widely shared interview, she and her sister Jennifer described how they struggled to access basic things like education funds and independent housing support that had been promised after the rescue, a frustration documented in a detailed television special. Another feature on the siblings’ lives after the escape described how some of them bounced between temporary placements and group settings, with Jordan saying she often felt she had to advocate for herself in rooms full of professionals who were supposed to be doing that job for her, a theme echoed again in a follow up profile of the.
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