Police found Gregory Jean Jr hidden behind a false wall, a captive in his father’s house, but for four years he had been in plain sight, an abused child growing up in a Georgia suburb. And still he remained invisible.



Police did not search for him because they did not know he was missing. Child services reportedly knew but were unsure where to look. His school in Atlanta knew something was not right, but lost track after his father and stepmother withdrew Gregory, supposedly for home schooling.

It was the price of life on the margins. His father, Gregory Jean Sr, and stepmother, Samantha Davis, allegedly kept him to avoid paying child support to his biological mother, Lisa Smith.

Smith, 38, believed to be an immigrant from Haiti, lived some 400 miles to the south in Florida. She alerted child services but did not notify police, possibly because she was afraid to do so.

Gregory said he was beaten with a stick, humiliated, forced to work as a maid, banned from celebrating Christmas, and isolated from his alleged captor family and the wider world.

A Cinderella, said some. But in a twist that could have been scripted by Mark Zuckerberg, the 13-year-old orchestrated his escape not by shimmying down a drainpipe or appealing to a neighbour, but by sending his mother a Facebook friend request, triggering the police search that eventually found him.

It was not straightforward: Gregory had to connect a cell phone without a service provider to a wifi network, then download an app that enabled calls via wifi. “I just went on [Google] Play Store and I downloaded an app called Magic Jack and I called my mom,” he later told reporters. He sent the address and a picture of the house in Clayton county, near Atlanta.

Police visited last Friday but left after Gregory’s father and stepmother said they had not seen him in years and suggested he was in New York.

“There was a lot of deception,” Clayton county police sergeant Joanne Southerland told a press conference later. “They denied, but no physical obstruction.”

Smith called police again with more details of his location inside the house – supplied in real time by texts from Gregory. They found him early Saturday behind a false wall in a linen cupboard in the attic of the garage, a cramped nook between insulation and wooden beams. “I was so grateful to the police officers when they found me,” he said later. “I kept saying, ‘thank you, thank you’.”

His mother and sister, Tracy Guervil, 19, drove through the night from Orlando to Jonesboro, Georgia, to be reunited with him. The scene of them hugging and weeping melted hearts across the United States. “It feels good,” said Smith. “It was too long.”

Gregory, wearing a bobble hat and brilliant smile, expressed festive spirit. “This is my mama’s Christmas gift – my whole family – this is their Christmas gift.”

On Sunday a judge remanded Jean, 37, and Davis, 42, in custody. They have been charged with child cruelty and false imprisonment, felony offences. It emerged that Davis was on probation for cutting her biological son’s tongue with a pair of hot scissors in 2004.

Gregory’s ordeal began in 2010 when his mother let him and his younger brother Samuel, now 12, visit their father, from whom she had separated, at his new home in Georgia.

Samuel returned to Florida but Davis insisted that Gregory stay, he said.

Smith and Jean had never married and had an informal deal for child maintenance payments. Keeping Gregory in Georgia appeared to be a way to save on these payments.

Initially, Gregory’s treatment was decent, he said, and he attended Point Middle School in Atlanta like a normal child.

But over time, his stepmother allegedly worked him like a maid, making him clean the house and yard and beating him with a stick if she was unhappy with the results. He said he often went without food, was forced to use a bucket as a toilet while others watched, and could not watch television or celebrate Christmas with her biological children. He slept on a cot in the garage.

When he complained to a school counsellor, school staff visited the home. His father and stepmother allegedly concealed the cot and bucket and put on a show that all was normal. Afterward, they punished Gregory and withdrew him from school for supposed home schooling, which mainly entailed writing out words from a dictionary.

He told reporters he was too afraid of Davis to seek help from neighbours or other outsiders. “She said you got to do what you got to do. She told me she had been in jail before but she never told me what for. She said she got crazy and not to mess with her when she was feeling bad.”

He was allowed calls to his mother a few times a year, but he had to put the phone on speaker and was coached on what to say, he said.

He said his father gave him a cellphone about a year ago to call school friends, but he did not dare use it to contact his mother via Facebook until last week, routing it through the wifi network.

The teenager urged mercy for his father and stepmother, saying he did not want them to go to jail. “I just want to be free to live my life and let them live theirs.” He would like to become a lawyer to help others, he said. His advice to other children whose cries for help go unheard: “Stay strong, hold on.”

Clayton County police chief Gregory Porter sounded less forgiving: “No one should have been in that area where we found the victim.”

A happy ending, of sorts, but the full story of a child lost in the maze of a broken family and inattentive state system remains untold. “There are a lot of unanswered questions at this point,” said Porter.