‘Boy In Box’ Opens Up About Past Locked In Plywood ‘Coffin’ During Youth, Is Reunited With Mother

It is a story of anguish and outrage: A little boy imprisoned for years in 2-foot-high plywood container. A child so mistreated and neglected that he was surprised to learn all children aren’t locked in boxes.

This weekend, there was a happy ending. The boy who survived the bitter childhood and difficult years that followed found the woman who had lost him but loved him throughout.

Tim Tremlett was 8 years old when he was freed from the box, barely larger than a coffin, where he had been kept by his step-grandmother for at least two years. Until last week, Tim, now 17, kept those memories hidden.

“I always figured if I told people, they’d start feeling sorry for me,” he said. “That’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to be a normal kid.”

But he did tell a few friends, who suggested he contact a newspaper. Last Thursday, Tim sat down with C.R. Roberts, a columnist for The News Tribune of Tacoma, hoping to find what he’d been seeking most of all.

“I want to find my mom,” he told Roberts. “I want to ask her questions. Other people told me she didn’t care about me. I want to know if that’s really true, and I want me and my mom to start over. If I find her, I’d feel whole. Right now, I feel empty.”

In Tuesday’s editions of The News Tribune, Roberts recounted Tim’s story. It began when Tim was an infant and his sister, Donna, a toddler. That’s when their mother, Debra Taylor, left them in Tacoma with her stepmother, Retha Skyles.

Taylor was moving to California, and planned to leave the children only a few weeks. When she returned for them, they and Skyles could not be found. Taylor searched, with no success.

In 1988, Skyles pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. She said she was not guilty, but believed the evidence would convict her. Roberts said recent attempts to reach her, by phone and at her home, were unsuccessful.

A prosecutor’s affidavit said Skyles told police she kept Tim in the box because he was prone to tantrums and she believed he had been brain damaged by his mother’s drug use. She said she didn’t want to send the boy to school because she didn’t want anyone to know where he was.

Court records say Tim was perhaps 6 when he was placed in the padlocked, windowless box measuring 6 feet long, 3 feet wide, 2 feet high. Tim says the imprisonment began much earlier.

“I keep dreaming about when I was younger, when I was in there,” he said. “I’ll wake up scared, sweating. It happens at least four times a week.”

The reality was just as bad.

“I just laid in there and thought about stuff,” Tim told Roberts. “I thought about what it would be like to go outside.”

He said he was bathed only occasionally, and then with a washcloth. He was rarely allowed to wear clothes. He was seldom allowed out to go to the bathroom - he was given a jar, which he used inside the box. There were no blankets or pillow: To keep warm, he slept curled tightly in a ball.

When given food, he saved half. Whenever he heard Skyles approach he was afraid, he said, because he thought he’d be hit by the woman who called him “the devil’s child.”

Tim said, and his sister agrees, that he was regularly paddled, sometimes severely, with a wooden cutting board. Court records do not mention any physical abuse and Skyles was not accused of any violence.

Tim thought she was his mother, and that all little boys lived in boxes. “But some moms,” he told Roberts, “were a little more lenient and let them do a little more than I did.”

Neither he nor his sister attended school. Donna, who was kept isolated in the house, but not in a box, was allowed no contact with her brother. Like him, she was too afraid to attempt escape.

Once he was given a stuffed animal by Skyles’ son. It was the first soft thing he remembers holding.

“You know who Snoopy is? He gave it to me, and I just kind of kept it with me, even when she took me out to beat me. I used to talk to it. I dreamed that it would come to life and break the lock. I thought maybe it would help me.”

Skyles, he said, eventually shredded the toy with a knife.

“A lot of times I wanted to crawl away and die. Most of the time I felt really scared and confused. I didn’t know what to think. Every day was the same thing. My day kept repeating itself. After a while, I just gave up.

“Toward the end,” he told Roberts, “I started to know what was happening just wasn’t right. That made it worse. Even though I knew it wasn’t right, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.”

An anonymous caller tipped police about the children, who were soon freed and sent to a foster home.

A social worker described seeing Tim walking crab-like, unable to stand upright, when he first stepped outside. At the foster home Tim was given a plate of food.

He ate with his hands, not knowing what silverware was for.

He ate macaroni and cheese, and thought the day must be a holiday. “I’d heard of Christmas, but I didn’t know anything about it.”

So much was new to the 8-year-old. He had never seen a dog, didn’t know what books were, how a faucet worked, not even how to play.

The first night, as his foster parents put him to bed, they kissed him. He had no memory of being kissed.

“It felt good,” he said. “It just seemed right.”

The first few years with his foster parents went well. The family adopted Tim and Donna in 1991. She eventually married and moved to Texas, where she lives with her husband and young daughter.

Donna is often in touch with her brother. Like him, she rarely speaks of the years with Skyles.

But when Tim became a teenager, he joined the wrong crowd, using drugs, dropping out of school, running away. The worst thing he did, he said, was to steal some checks from his adoptive parents when he was 14.

Eventually, he said, he began to realize he was not at fault for what had happened to him. And, he told Roberts, he wanted to take responsibility for the rest of his life, by finding a job, finishing school, and finding his mother.

Roberts wrote that during the interview, he handed Tim copies of old newspaper articles concerning his case. One told of how Taylor had come to Tacoma from Eureka, Calif., and found her children had been kept prisoners. His mother had sought, but failed, to regain custody.

Tim phoned his girlfriend, Roberts said. “I know my mom’s name,” he told her.

When he hung up, he held his head in his hands and sobbed. “I’m sorry,” he said, after a minute or so. “I usually control it around people. I only cry when I’m by myself.”

With Roberts’ help, he found the name of a relative in Eureka who provided his mother’s phone number. Tim phoned her.

“This is something I only dreamed about,” he told Roberts a few hours later.

He borrowed money for bus fare, and with a friend and Roberts, left early Saturday morning on the 20-hour trip south. They arrived in Eureka about 10 p.m. Saturday. Taylor was waiting as the bus stopped and ran to hug her son.

“I love you so much,” she said, crying. “You’re too skinny. Mama’s going to fatten you up. I’m shaking, I’m so excited.”

Tim laughed, Roberts said, like a normal embarrassed teen.

He met Lonnie, his half-brother, Taylor’s younger son. He showed Taylor photographs of Donna’s daughter.

“I knew I was a grandma, I just knew it,” Taylor said.

At her house, she called her daughter, and showed Tim his baby pictures.

“You were such a good boy,” Taylor said.

She said she never gave up hope she would find her children. She never abandoned them, she said, but was overwhelmed by the legal system. She didn’t know how the system worked, nor where to find help.

“I’ve been waiting for this for so long,” she said. “All I ever wanted was to find my kids.”