Healing From 5 Years Of Rape, Torture In Mom’s Attic, Teen Shines

DETROIT, MI — “You literally took my soul away from me.” It took Curtis “C.J.” Miller four years of healing to say that publicly about his mother and her boyfriend, who held him captive for nearly five years in an attic on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He was 10 when she took him from his dad’s house in Detroit, hid him away in Escanaba and then systematically raped, beat and tortured her son while her boyfriend watched.

The boy was fed precious little — a daily ration of oatmeal or rice and a bit of water — and his captors duct-taped his legs so he couldn’t escape when they were gone, sometimes for as long as a day. When he was unshackled once a day to use the bathroom, his knees buckled, and he collapsed on the floor.

Birthdays passed alone in the attic, and Miller was 15 in 2013 when police, acting on a request for a welfare check from a relative, rescued him in what became an internationally sensational case. His mother, Susan Bardo, and her boyfriend, Carl Pellinen, are serving prison 25-year prison sentences. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, and click here to find your local Michigan Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

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When police found him, Miller was emaciated, terrified and angry. Deprived of education during his years in captivity, he emerged from the attic with the education of a third grader. He was diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder and PTSD, challenges that made the climb back all the more ardent.

But last spring, Miller graduated from University Prep Academy in Detroit with a 3.5 grade point average. Last month in Jacksonville, Florida, he was selected from among 25 nominees for the National A.C.E. of the Year Award for 2017. The award is presented by the National Exchange Club, a national service organization founded in Detroit in 1911, to a student who has overcome significant hardships to graduate. It comes with a $10,000 scholarship.

After he was rescued, Miller went to a residential facility where he began “healing right away,” according to a biography on the National Exchange Club website. His long-term goal is to build a similar place, where residents and staff live together and function as a family.

“I know the difference a place like this can make in the life of a hurting child, firsthand,” he said in the Exchange Club website story. “It makes a big difference to have a loving family, rather than staff who go home after eight hours.”

Miller spoke publicly about the years he was held prisoner in an attic for the first time this week in an interview with Detroit television station WXYZ. The details are hard to hear, but he told the TV station he wanted to share them to let survivors know that a happier life can await them on the other side of horrific abuse. There are about 13,000 Michigan kids in foster care and another 300 who are awaiting permanent adoptive homes.

Social worker Missy Parker-Miller had just married the teen's father when they got the call that he had been rescued. They had looked for him unsuccessfully and assumed that wherever he was, his mother was caring for him, Parker-Miller told WXYZ.

Miller was understandably angry, and those around him took the brunt of it in the beginning.

“I admit when I first came down here I thought everything was a threat and I had to protect myself,” he told the TV station.

While Parker-Miller said she took precautions to keep her daughter safe and told her to lock her bedroom door, she also recognized that Miller was blameless for his behavior. She saw him “as a person who had been hurt.”

“Children who have been hurt and traumatized, they can heal,” Parker-Miller said. “It is wonderful to see that happen.”

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