Beginning in 2010, when the family lived in Murrieta, David Turpin filed paperwork to run a private school out of his home, putting himself down as principal of what he called the Sandcastle Day School. The state Department of Education said in a statement Tuesday that under California law, the agency does not have the authority to monitor or inspect private schools.
– The 13 siblings rescued from captivity in a California home were so badly treated that mental and physical recovery is likely to take a very long time, experts say. Corona Regional Medical Center CEO Mark Uffer says his staff was horrified by the condition of the seven adults in the group, who were so malnourished that they were mistaken for children. Sophia Grant, medical director of the child abuse unit at Riverside University Health System, tells the Press-Enterprise that such stunting of growth would have required malnourishment over a long period. She says recovery will be a gradual process for the siblings, who have likely suffered psychological damage from being deprived of normal interaction and from being mistreated by the parents who were supposed to provide for them. In other developments: Home-schooling. Father David Turpin, a former engineer at the Northrop Grumman aerospace company registered to run a private school out of his home, was required only to submit a form every year. Advocates for greater oversight of home-schooling in California say the abuse could have been exposed much earlier if the children had been required to have annual checkups from doctors and teachers, the Los Angeles Times reports. "Current law provides nothing to stop families like the Turpins from using home-schooling to isolate and imprison their children," says Rachel Coleman of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.