Karen Graham and her husband sensed that the boy who lived next door wasn’t being treated well. Eduardo Posso seemed terrified, too scared to even pet their dog. They heard his father yelling late into the night, watched as the 12-year-old was forced to move heavy circus equipment off the porch every day so that he could sweep it, and noticed that his siblings rarely left the efficiency apartment that the family shared in Myakka City, Fla.

But she was still shocked when she heard the news: Last Friday, months after his family pulled him and his siblings out of school and began an itinerant life on the road, Posso had died. Authorities in Bloomington, Ind., were accusing his father and stepmother of shackling him in a motel bathtub and forcing him to wear a shock collar intended for a dog. An initial investigation suggested that he had starved to death.

“He would smile at us because he knew he had a friend next door, but he just never trusted me enough to talk to me,” Graham told the Bradenton Herald. “I wish he would have.”

Child welfare officials had made multiple visits to the Florida apartment that Eduardo’s father, Luis Posso, and his stepmother, Dayan Median Flores, shared, the paper reported. But they never found proof that the boy was being neglected or abused. Now, Posso, 32, and Flores, 25, both face felony child neglect charges in Indiana. At a Tuesday news conference, authorities said they could be potentially be charged with murder once a coroner has officially determined the boy’s cause of death.

“There are no words for this kind of abuse,” Monroe County Detective Lt. Jennifer Allen said. “Disbelief, horror, shock — you can’t even put it into words.”…

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