WAKEMAN, Ohio — They looked like perfectly normal kids, riding bicycles in the streets and playing on a plastic jungle gym in their backyard. But neighbors had one nagging question about Michael and Sharen Gravelle's 11 children:
How could all of them, 1 to 14 years in age, possibly live in such a small home?
People are friendly but private in this rural community west of Cleveland, and nobody dared to intrude. But when police raided the five-room house recently based on an anonymous tip, they got an answer: Nine of the kids were forced to sleep in wooden cages -- and the Gravelles didn't think anything was wrong, officials said.
"I've never seen anything like this," Huron County Sheriff's Lt. Randy Sommers said at a news conference this week. "I've seen cases of children in closets, in basements, in outbuildings, in cars. This is the first I've seen of children in cages."
The 11 kids, all adopted, were whisked out of the house on St. John Road and placed temporarily in four foster homes. They are special-needs children, with problems including fetal alcohol syndrome, HIV, autism and Down syndrome.
Huron County Prosecutor Russell Leffler said Wednesday that his office was still investigating the case, which has focused national attention on a sleepy rural area. Though no decision has been made, Leffler said potential criminal charges against the couple could include abduction, unlawful restraint and child endangering.
"We're still trying to figure out where all the kids came from," he said after a long meeting with sheriff's deputies. "This has become a very complicated case."
The couple denied any wrongdoing when they appeared this week at a preliminary juvenile court hearing. They have declined to comment further, and their whereabouts are not known. The couple's lawyer, David Sherman, did not return phone calls.
But he issued a news statement Wednesday evening, saying that the Gravelles, with the approval of a social worker, had constructed "enclosures" around their beds, because the children demonstrated "extreme behavioral problems" and that "traditional methods of behavior control were unsuccessful."
As she stood on her small front porch Wednesday, down the street from the Gravelle home, Mildred Timperman, Sharen Gravelle's mother, angrily defended her daughter.
