Dad in Longview child abuse trial claims boy preferred dog food

By Associated Press and KOMO Staff Published: Jul 26, 2012 at 8:39 AM PDT Last Updated: Jul 26, 2012 at 10:44 AM PDT
Dad in Longview child abuse trial claims boy preferred dog food
Jeff Trebilcock cries during his testimony in a Cowlitz County courtroom. He and his wife, Rebecca, are accused of starving their adopted children.
LONGVIEW, Wash. - A Longview man accused of neglect and withholding food from five adopted children tearfully took the witness stand Wednesday in his own defense.

Jeffery Trebilcock denied forcing a 13-year-old boy to eat goat and dog food, making him stay outside on a porch or leaving him barefoot. Trebilcock said the boy could eat as much food as he wanted but he liked the taste of dog food.

The Daily News reports Trebilcock testified he didn't realized the boy was malnourished because he never saw him undressed.

"I told them I wasn't gonna let nothin' happen to them," Trebilcock said about his children. "I felt like a failure now."

The boy weighed only 49 pounds - half the normal weight for his age - when he and four adopted sisters were placed in protective custody in March of last year.

The boy was severely malnourished and near death when he was rushed to a Portland hospital last year, his heart beating so slowly one doctor was surprised he was conscious, Smith said. The boy and his four adopted sisters, ages 8 and 13, all rapidly gained weight and improved in health once they were away from the Trebilcocks.

Trebilcock and his wife Rebecca are charged with criminal mistreatment in a bench trial before a Cowlitz County Superior Court judge.

The couple's four biological children, most of them in their late teens, were well-fed, authorities said.

Defense lawyers Kevin Blondin and Ted Debray said the Trebilcocks are good parents who clothed their children and gave them all the food they wanted. The kids were underweight because they'd recently suffered a bout of the flu, the attorneys told the judge.

The lawyers suggested other medical problems, such as fetal alcohol syndrome, also could explain the boy's condition.

The boy who testified Monday said he wasn't allowed to use the bathroom at night so he urinated in a cup. He said that if his parents found the cup, they made him drink it.

The boy said his parents taped his mouth shut as a punishment. He testified that he was often cold and damp. When he wet himself or the bed, the Trebilcocks made him wash his own sheets and clothes in a bucket in the yard, regardless of how cold or wet the weather. He then hung the clothes and sheets outside.

He wasn't allowed to wear shoes often on the Trebilcocks' roughly 30 acres in west Longview and did chores - feeding and watering goats and other animals - in his bare feet, he said. And his parents insisted that his bare feet be inspected before he came inside to ensure that he didn't track dirt into the house. But no one would bother, he said, so he spent hours huddled on the porch. If he cried about it, he said, his mother or another family member popped out the door and doused him with cold water from a glass.

The boy said his parents sometimes fed him on the porch. They put food in a plastic potato salad container, which they called his trough, then passed it out the door to him. Breakfasts often amounted to dry oatmeal, he said. And on at least one occasion the Trebilcocks gave him moldy bread because they didn't want it to go to waste.