An Arkansas couple has been charged with more than 100 felony child abuse counts after police found a 15-year-old boy, naked and locked in a bathroom in their apartment with a ratchet strap.

Mountain View Police were called to the apartment Saturday afternoon after a 911 call reported cries for help coming from an upstairs apartment, KTLO reported. Officers responded to the caller’s apartment and could hear the boy talking from their master bedroom, saying he was trapping in a bathroom and could not get out.

“The neighbors downstairs, they could hear something going on upstairs. They could hear a child in there asking for help. An officer arrives, went into their apartment,” Investigator Mike Day told Ozarks First. “They brought him back there and he could hear the child in there. So he went upstairs to investigate, knocked on the door, and the only ones that answered the door were a ten and 11-year-old at the house.”

The children said their parents were at work and that they couldn’t imagine who might be trapped in the bathroom, KTLO said. The officer found a ratchet strap attached to a bedpost and bathroom door. When he removed the strap, he found the teen naked inside.

The boy said his mother had put him in the bathroom on Friday.

The two younger children then admitted that the 15-year-old sleeps on a pallet in the bathroom while they sleep on bunk beds in a bedroom.

Police took the parents, 40-year-old Daniel Alan Wright and 42-year-old Jaclyn Machelle Barnett, in for questioning. Initially, they said they didn’t know how the boy got locked in the bathroom and suggested it might have been the children playing. But when the two younger children were unable to property use the ratchet strap, the parents said the ratchet was used to keep the children out of the bathroom because of a leaky faucet.

The teen, however, told investigators that he does not have a bedroom and that he only eats at school. School attendance records show he’s only attended school 112 days since January.

Further investigation uncovered 29 cases of maltreatment opened since 2013 involving the boy. Those cases involved inaadequate supervision, failure to provide food, failure to provide essential needs, extreme or repeated cruelty, and failure to protect. The cases were opened after the Arkansas Department of Humans Services Child Abuse Hotline received calls from mandated reporters and anonymous callers.

Day told Ozarks First that the downstairs neighbors who called in the boy’s cries for help were heroes.

The investigator couldn’t explain how the previous calls about the boy hadn’t led to any changes.

“We all failed this kid. As a whole, we all failed him,” he said.

The boy has been removed from the home, Day said. He didn’t say if the other two children remained.

Barnett and Wright have been charged with 112 counts of false imprisonment and one count each of endangering the welfare of a minor and permitting the abuse of a minor.

Both were given $50,000 bonds. Wright posted his. bond and was released, while Barnett remains behind bars.

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[Featured image: David Alan Wright and Jaclyn Machelle Barnett/Baxter County Sheriff’s Office]