Years before David and Louise Turpin and their 13 kids were found in squalid conditions in a suburban Perris, California home, the family lived in Rio Vista, Texas, and neighbors say they left behind similar “filth.”
One Rio Vista resident who lived near the Turpins said a large amount of garbage was found at their residence following foreclosure — as well as family pets.
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“We open the door and the dogs came flying out,” neighbor Shelli Vinyard recalls to Soledad O’Brien in a preview of Oxygen’s upcoming The Turpin 13 special. “They had been living off the trash and dirty diapers that they’d left in the house to eat.”
Her daughter, Ashley Vinyard, remembers a similar scene inside their Rio Vista home, which was apparently an example for how the family maintained its isolation.
“The living room was set-up like a makeshift school, with a broken chalkboard set up against it and there wasn’t like crayons, there wasn’t coloring books, there wasn’t toys. It was just filth and trash,” Ashley said. “The carpet had been ripped up and plywood had been laid down and you could still see — even the plywood was stained and gross.”
She continues in the clip, “The bedrooms where the kids were clearly living were set up I guess like bunks, just like a barrack[s]. Just one bunkbed right after the other right after the other, and in the other room it was the same way.”
Another Rio Vista neighbor previously told PEOPLE that he’d seen troubling signs at their residence once they’d left, like “padlocks on everything: the refrigerator, the closets, the toy boxes, the bathrooms. There were also ropes tied to the beds.”
“How could it go unnoticed when you foreclose on a property?” Ashley wondered in the clip.
David and Louise, 56 and 49, respectively, were arrested in January on suspicion of torture and child endangerment, and charged with several counts of torture, child abuse and false imprisonment. A charge was also filed against father David of one count of a lewd act on a child.
They face up to 94 years to life in prison if convicted on all charges.
The Turpins pleaded not guilty to all counts.
“All the victims were and are severely malnourished. The 29-year-old female victim weighs 82 pounds,” Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said at the January arraignment.
Hestrin also confirmed that the siblings would “sleep all day and be up all night” and that “none of the victims were allowed to shower more than once a year.”
The 17-year-old girl who escaped out of a window and called 911 had been planning her escape for two years, Hestrin said.
When police raided the Perris, California “horror house,” some of the 13 siblings bound and shackled were found lying in their own feces.
“The smell was terrible,” Deputy Mike Vasquez of the Riverside Sheriff’s Office told the Daily Mail. “Feces and urine everywhere.”
A police source close to the investigation told NBC News that the children showered only twice a year and ate one rationed meal per day.
