Tortured Turpin daughter bullied as 'cootie kid.' Now classmate feels overwhelming guilt

Colin Atagi | The Desert Sun

Show Caption Hide Caption DA Michael Hestrin speaks on charges against David and Louise Turpin District Attorney Michael Hestrin speaks on charges against David and Louise Turpin, who are accused of abusing 13 children, in January 2018.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Taha Muntajibuddin remembers a third-grade classmate in Fort Worth, Texas, whose appearance drew relentless mockery and bullying from her fellow students, who nicknamed her "cootie kid."

The girl, one of the oldest siblings in the large Turpin family, wore the same filthy purple dress every day and had her hair tied back with a discarded foil wrapper from an old Hershey's bar, Mutajibuddin recalled. No one wanted to be near her because she smelled like mud and worse.

Last week, Mutajibuddin, who went to school with the girl years ago, wrote in a wrenching Facebook post that he got a "rude awakening" when he read the news accounts of the familial horror created by the girl's parents, David and Louise Turpin. The couple is accused of imprisoning, starving and torturing 12 of their children, half of them now adults ranging in age up to 29, at their home Perris home.

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Muntajibuddin, a physician completing a residency in pediatric medicine in Houston, said he felt an "overwhelming sense of guilt and shame" about his former classmate, whom he remembers being tossed about "like a rag doll" by school bullies.

"Of course, none of us are responsible for the events that ensued, but you can't help but feel rotten when the classmate your peers made fun of for 'smelling like poop' quite literally had to sit in her own waste because she was chained to her bed," he wrote. "It is nothing but sobering to know that the person who sat across from you at the lunch table went home to squalor and filth while you went home to a warm meal and a bedtime story."

He said the girl was often made fun of constantly "because her clothes would sometimes look as though they had been dragged through mud, which she would also smell like on most days. I distinctly remember my entire third grade class scoffing at her one day because our teacher had asked her to discard a scrunchy she had used to tie her hair out of a discarded tin foil wrapper from an old Hershey's bar."

After that year, Muntajibuddin said, the girl moved away and "she was forgotten about after we moved on to the the next 'cootie kid.'"

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Years later, while in medical school, Muntajibudden found himself searching social media for any trace of the Turpin girl, thinking that "somewhere, somehow, (she) was probably living her best life, showing up all of us gawky third-graders ... She was going to be that person at the reunion looking completely flawless and making six figures while the rest of us tried to conceal our receding hair lines and minimum wage jobs."

He added: "I feel like we all kind of have that hope that those people who were marginalized growing up (sometimes by our own hands) somehow grew past those circumstances, and essentially grew up to kick ass in real life. That's what I had hoped for (the girl). That she had used the insults that we hurled at her, the isolation we provided for her, and the ill-looks we gave her and used it as ammunition to forge a successful path in life."

But that's not what happened.

Muntajibuddin says he's read numerous articles on the case with disturbing details provided by authorities — like how the siblings were only allowed to shower once a year, were punished for as little as getting their wrists wet while washing hands and were barely being fed while their parents ate in front of them.

Looking back, Muntajibuddin says there should have been more than a phone call to police.

He wrote: "The resounding lesson here is a simple one, something that we're taught from the very beginning: be nice. Teach your children to be nice. If you see someone that's isolated, befriend them. If you see someone that's marginalized, befriend them. If you see someone that's different, befriend them. We can never completely put ourselves in others' shoes nor can we completely understand the circumstances that one is brought up in, but a simple act of kindness and acceptance may be the ray of hope that that person needs."

Follow Colin Atagi on Twitter: @TDSColinAtagi

Previously: Parents chained 13 malnourished kids to furniture, taunted them with food

Previously: 'Not one person called us' about odd behavior in captive-children case, official says

Previously: Woman accused of torturing kids 'shut us out,' sister says