Turpin children suffered beatings, sexual abuse in foster home, lawsuit alleges

Six Turpin children, already subjected to a lifetime of torture, were sexually and physically abused by foster family members who forced them to eat their own vomit, sit alone for hours, told them they should kill themselves and made them recount details of their parents’ abuse, two new lawsuits allege.

The lawsuits, which a lawyer for four of the siblings said were filed Tuesday, July 19, in Riverside County Superior Court, accuse Riverside County and at least one private foster care agency of ignoring red flags and failing to protect the Turpins from Marcelino Olguin, his wife, Rosa, and their daughter, Lennys. The three Olguin family members have pleaded not guilty to about a dozen felony counts alleging they abused nine foster children in their care.

The county and ChildNet Youth and Family Services and Foster Family Network “had a duty to protect” the Turpins, the lawsuits state.

Instead, the defendants “protected the foster parents by failing to report the abuse and neglect of (the Turpins) to child protective services or to law enforcement and by failing to intervene and interfere when abuse and neglect was reported by others,” the lawsuits alleged, adding the Turpins were allowed to stay in the Olguins’ Perris home for three years.

ChildNet did not immediately respond to phone messages seeking comment Wednesday, July 20. Lawyers for Marcelino and Lennys Olguin could not immediately be reached. Riverside County officials did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment. Rosa Olguin’s lawyer, Joshua Matic, declined to comment.

The lawsuits hopefully will “bring justice for the Turpins and help prevent something like this from ever happening to other kids,” Roger Booth, attorney for four of the siblings, said via email.

“We also hope that these lawsuits will shed light on the county’s failure to closely monitor the work of foster family agencies like ChildNet, which are given broad authority over the selection, training and oversight of foster parents in Riverside County,” Booth added.

Oakwood Legal Group of Los Angeles is representing the other two siblings.

Booth alleged that ChildNet and the county knew about abuse accusations against the Olguins before the Turpins were placed there. Booth added that he does not know about any criminal investigation of the Olguins alleging abuse or neglect before 2021.

Sheriff’s deputies in 2018 found the 13 Turpin siblings, ages 2 to 29, chained to their beds in a Perris house, filthy, malnourished and stunted in their mental and physical development. Their parents, David and Louise Turpin, who authorities said routinely beat and strangled their children and deprived them of food, pleaded guilty to 14 felony counts in 2019 and are serving sentences of 25 years to life in state prison.

After they were freed, the minor Turpins were placed in foster care while the adults were assigned to the county’s public guardian office. According to the lawsuits, the county asked ChildNet to find a foster home for six of the children.

The Olguins “were unfit to be foster parents … because (they) had a prior history of physically and emotionally abusing children as well as severely neglecting children who had been placed in their care,” the lawsuits allege.

Carly Sanchez, a lawyer in Booth’s firm, said by phone that her firm spoke with “a number of” ChildNet employees who voiced concerns about the Turpins being placed with the Olguins.

The firm also interviewed foster parents who took in kids who lived at the Olguins, Sanchez said. Those children said the Olguins abused them, and their new foster parents passed that information along to ChildNet, Sanchez said.

ChildNet, Sanchez said, had a duty to pass along that information to Riverside County.

“We don’t know if they complied with that duty,” she said, adding the firm is still looking into that.

ChildNet had “a financial motive to place a large number of foster children in this foster home and thereby strengthen its relationship with the County of Riverside, and it put that financial motive ahead of its responsibility to children,” the lawsuits allege.

The defendants “were put on notice that (the Olguins) were sexually, physically and emotionally abusing and severely neglecting” the Turpins, with at least one child telling social workers about the abuse, the lawsuits allege.

The lawsuits allege the Olguins abused the Turpins in the following ways:

The lawsuits seek unspecified damages for the Turpins’ “physical and psychological injuries and emotional distress.”

The legal action comes about a week after the release of a 634-page report from an independent investigation of Riverside County’s care of the Turpins.

The county announced the probe on the heels of an ABC News “20/20” report that aired in November. In it, two of the adult children said they struggled to find money for food, were forced to live in bad neighborhoods and were cast into society with few life skills or regard for their well-being, an assertion backed by District Attorney Mike Hestrin.

Larson LLP, the law firm hired to do the investigation, made a sweeping series of recommended improvements to the county’s child and adult protective services, which the Board of Supervisors has pledged to implement. The recommendations call for strengthening foster home oversight and fixing a chronic foster home shortage.

Booth has sued the county before. In 2018, the county agreed to pay roughly $11 million to settle two of his clients’ lawsuits, one involving a girl who was repeatedly raped and eventually impregnated and the other involving a toddler found hugging her infant sibling’s mummified corpse.

In both cases, social workers failed to heed warning signs to remove the children from their homes, the lawsuits allege.

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