“To me and my wife, Nancy, who was with me during the interviews, we always thought of them as very nice people who spoke highly of their children,” the attorney said. “They seemed like very normal people who fell into financial problems.”
Trahan said that David Turpin, who worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman, an aeronautics and defense technology company, had a “relatively high” income, but had trouble keeping up with his expenses because he had so many children.
Bankruptcy documents show David Turpin earned more than $140,000 in 2011, when the records were filed, but that the family’s expenses exceeded his take-home pay by more than $1,000 a month. Louise Turpin, listed as a homemaker, had no income, the records show.
A spokesman for Lockheed Martin, another aerospace and defense company, said Turpin worked for the company until 2010, but had no other information.
The neighborhood where the children were found is a development of neat ranch-style homes built in recent years, residents said.
The Turpins’ house is the type found in developments all across Southern California — a single-story residence with stucco walls painted a reddish brown and a tile roof. A nativity star was placed in one window, and a van and three newer model Volkswagens were parked in the driveway.
Kimberly Milligan, 50, who lives across the street, said that when she first moved in she would see a woman outside the house with an infant, but eventually stopped seeing the child.
Over the years, Milligan also occasionally saw three children who looked like preteens coming out of the house to get into a car with their parents.
A lot about the family struck her as strange, she said. The children she saw were very pale — an observation several other neighbors made as well. And she often wondered why, if there were so many children in the house, they never came out to play.
“I thought the kids were home-schooled,” she said. “You know something is off, but you don’t want to think bad of people.”
Once about two years ago, she said, she came across the preteens putting up Christmas lights at the home and said hello.
“They looked at us like a child who wants to make themselves invisible,” she said.
On Monday, Milligan was struggling to grasp how the alleged cruelty could have gone unnoticed in the neighborhood.
“We’re not acres apart,” she said. “How did no one see anything?”
As neighbors gathered in disbelief and news trucks descended on the neighborhood Monday afternoon, an ice cream truck roamed the streets and little boys rode skateboards on the sidewalk.
Several neighbors recalled an incident several months ago in which a number of children were out in front of the house late at night working under floodlights to put sod in the yard.
“That was kind of weird, all four of them were on the ground rolling out sod,” said Wendy Martinez, 41, who lives around the corner from the family. A woman who appeared to be the children’s mother was standing in front of the home, in an archway, watching, Martinez recalled.
At the time, code enforcement officers from the city had visited the neighborhood and were citing homes with unkept yards, said Gary Stein, 32, who lives on the street.
“I thought it was weird, but I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t want to get in anybody’s business,” he said.
Source:beta.latimes.com