Adoptive parents sentenced to prison after 10-year-old was found wandering neighborhood weighing just 36 pounds
GRIFFIN, Ga. (WANF/Gray News) – A Georgia couple accused of intentionally starving and abusing their adoptive son have taken a non-negotiated plea deal and were sentenced to decades in prison on Thursday.
Krista and Tyler Schindley were sentenced to 40 years in prison and 20 years of probation.
Both were also sentenced on several other charges that will run concurrently with the prison and probation sentencing.
“I’ve seen people do heinous things to each other,” Judge Benjamin Coker with the Griffin Judicial Circuit said at the sentencing. “But as I sat here yesterday, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve never seen a human being who would do what you two did to another human being.’”
The Schindleys pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree cruelty to children, two counts of false imprisonment, one count of criminal attempt to commit felony, one count of aggravated battery and one count of family violence battery.
Krista also pleaded guilty to three additional charges of aggravated assault.
The couple was arrested in May 2023 after a neighbor found their visibly malnourished 10-year-old child wandering around the neighborhood.
In a 911 call, the neighbor said she saw the child walking alone and went to ask him if he was OK.
“He’s asking us not to tell his parents. I don’t know who his parents are,” the woman told dispatch. “He begged us not to take him home.”
Griffin police described the boy as “thin with discolored skin and visible injuries.”
The boy told police he was hungry and that he was walking to a nearby Kroger to get food.
Investigators said he weighed just 36 pounds when they examined him. He also had an “extremely low” heart rate.
According to the affidavit, the parents intentionally withheld food from their son and often locked him in his bedroom with no access to food, light, hot or warm running water, human interaction or a bathroom.
Court documents suggest that the Schindleys not only abused their son, leaving “dental injuries” and “disfiguration,” but did so in the presence of other minors in the home.
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