The parents of a New York teenager were arrested over the weekend after police found their child, a teenager, bound inside the trunk of a car.
Officers responded to a report of an assault on a woman around 5:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25.
According to police, multiple witnesses had called 911, saying the mother was hitting the daughter, reported The New York Post. One witness reported a struggle between the teen and the older woman in the backseat of a 2009 Toyota Prius.
Police rushed to Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side, where they found a 19-year-old woman in the back of the Prius.
Eighteen-year-old witness Juliana Cruzado, 18, who lives on Forsyth Street, told the Post she and her boyfriend saw the incident unfold.
Cruzado said the victim was “all taped up, and [the older woman] was on top of her, strangling her.”
The woman had duct tape around her wrists, ankles, and mouth, sources told the Post.
“The tape was over her mouth all around her head… Her arms were taped together from her wrist to her elbows,” Cruzado added.
The victim’s father, Menachem Cohen, 40, and mother, Rachel Cohen, 38, were both at the scene and arrested.
The Cohens live in Monticello, around 100 miles outside of the city.
Each parent was charged with unlawful imprisonment, reckless endangerment, assault, criminal possession of a controlled substance, and menacing.
The parents claimed that their daughter has a mental disorder that forced them to restrain her.
The New York Daily News said that the parents added they feared their daughter would escape from them if she were not bound.
Witnesses who placed the initial 911 calls that prompted officers to find the Cohens said they saw the mother hitting her daughter.
The teen had bruising and swelling at multiple places on her body, and was taken to Bellevue Hospital for treatment.
WABC reported that she was later admitted to a psychiatric ward.
One source told the Post that she has “diminished mental capacity.”
It’s not clear what prompted her admission to the ward.
A neighbor of the family in Monticello described the couple as “very nice people” and told the Post that they were “very shocked” by the news of the arrests.
From NTD.tv
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