TRACY — The boy was naked except for a pair of gray boxer shorts. He was covered with soot and gashes and shackled with a heavy chain when he flopped over the 8-foot-high backyard fence and landed in a health club parking lot, free.
Alarmed, a member of In-Shape Sports Club raced to see if the youth had been injured when he hit the cold pavement in this Bay Area bedroom community.
"Please, hide me, please, hide me," were the first words out of his mouth as he came through the glass doors of the sprawling gym and approached assistant general manager Lea Leonardo. His voice was urgent, his eyes were terrified.
"When he came behind the front desk, I saw the chain and realized he had just escaped," Leonardo said Wednesday as she described the harrowing sight of a bloody child with a three-foot chain padlocked to his right ankle. "I started shaking and called 911. You would never imagine a child like that."
Authorities say the boy had allegedly been abused by his father and then by the aunt in whose home he had been placed for protection. And for about the last year, he had been held captive in a nondescript tract home here in the gateway to the Central Valley.
Small and emaciated, with bare, swollen feet, cuts on his back, a gash on his head and dried blood on his arm, the boy looked to Leonardo to be no more than 12 or 13.
He told the gym staff he was 16, but he's actually a year older. His September birthday came and went while he was in captivity. He never knew.
On Wednesday, a Tracy couple and the boy's aunt were in San Joaquin County Jail, charged with torture, kidnapping, false imprisonment and "pay for adoption" -- a charge that means authorities believe his aunt may have tried to sell the boy to the couple, a cable installer and his Girl Scout leader wife.
Much of the last 18 months is shrouded in mystery for the young man, who was known to at least one neighbor family as Kyle. Authorities would not say whether he was chained up regularly or where he was held in the house on Tennis Lane, with its Christmas wreaths and garden gnomes.
But since his daring escape three days ago, he has been the recipient of kindness instead of blows.
As the boy cowered behind the front desk at In-Shape Sports, staff members quickly covered him with towels. They stayed close by his side so he would feel safe from the captors he feared would take him back.
