Man Shares Haunting Conversation With Boy, 6, Tied Up and Locked in a Shed, Calls CPS

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A starving 6-year-old boy was found tied up in a padlocked shed by his neighbor in Dallas. After the little boy’s safe retrieval, his neighbor shared shocking snippets of their conversation with news media.

Juan Vaquero, 54, was renting a camper from the little boy’s grandmother, Esmeralda Lira, 53, and her boyfriend, Jose Balderas, 64. On May 10, 2020, Vaquero heard a voice around 10 p.m. and went into the yard to investigate. What he found, reports CBS DFW, prompted him to call Child Protective Services (CPS).

Vaquero heard the voice emanating from the shed near his camper and realized it was his landlord’s 6-year-old grandson. Ascertaining that the little boy had been restrained and locked inside, Vaquero proceeded to record their conversation on his mobile phone and later shared it with CBS DFW.

“I can walk, but I can’t move my hands and touch,” the child said in the recording. The concerned neighbor asked the little boy whether his grandmother had bound his hands, and the child replied, “Yes.”

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When asked why his hands were tied, the child explained, “Because she didn’t want me grabbing things anymore.” The little boy also explained that he had been inside the shed since 6 p.m. and had no bed or blankets to sleep on.

Vaquero later told CBS DFW that the boy had often asked him for food in the past and had professed that his 54-year-old neighbor was his “friend.” Vaquero gave the boy sandwiches and snacks but admitted, through tears, that his “heart would break.”

Upon discovering the boy locked in the shed on May 10, Vaquero offered to fetch him a sandwich or some jello, to which the child replied, “I can’t open jello. She tied my hands behind my back like the police do, but with a rope. And she tightened them.”

“She lets me out in the morning,” he added. “I’ll take a bath and then we’ll see each other outside.”

Vaquero informed the boy that he was going to call for help, at which point the frightened child said “Okay,” and started to cry. Police arrived an hour later at 11 p.m. that night and confronted both Lira and her boyfriend, Balderas, on the whereabouts of the absent boy.

According to WFAA, Lira only surrendered the key to the shed after police threatened to kick the door down. The search warrant states that the little boy was found inside the shed among rats and insects, “standing alone in the pitch-black shed in a blue storage bin with his hands tied behind his back with shoelaces.”

He had indentations on his wrists from being tied up.

The 6-year-old in an interview with investigators regaled being banned from the house and being given a plastic bag to use when he needed the bathroom. Additionally, affidavits state that Lira would tie his wrists and tell him “he is bad” as well as kick and grab him.

Court records later stated that the child had likely been locked in the shed every night for two weeks before he was discovered by Vaquero on May 10.

Two sleeping siblings, aged 7 and 4, were also found inside the grandmother’s house on the night of the rescue. Lira’s sole explanation for locking her 6-year-old grandson in the shed was that he stole food.

Both Lira and Balderas were arrested on felony charges of endangering a child and held on a bond of $100,000 each, reports The Sun. Child Protection Services officials informed WFAA that the three siblings had been placed in foster care as of May 11.

Vaquero, after turning in his landlord, will be living elsewhere. “I did what I had to do,” he claimed, reports KTVT. “It had to be me who spoke up.”