He spoke out to the news organization after his foster parents, Richard and Cynthia Kelly, were charged with aggravated child abuse for keeping his 14-year-old brother trapped in the basement of their Alabama home for much of two years.

When the boy was found, he weighed 55 pounds. That’s half of the average weight of a 14-year-old boy, 110 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The Associated Press reported the boy was in critical condition on Nov. 15, and the Helena Police Chief Pete Folmar called it the “worst case of neglect” he’s ever seen.

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The two will appear in court on Dec. 14 and 15 for preliminary hearings. They have not yet entered a plea.

But Eddie Carter said he too was mistreated. The teenager was his younger brother, and Carter alleged that the couple once held him in the basement as well.

He told AL.com that he and his brother were two of five siblings born to a woman in Huntsville, who eventually lost parental rights to all of them for reasons he did not explain.

The five were passed around from foster home to foster home, but Carter and his brother were never separated.

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“I took care of him a lot, changing his diapers and stuff, making sure he was eating. When he was sleeping, I’d check his chest to make sure he was breathing,” Carter told the newspaper. “My little brother was like my golden egg. I just had to keep him safe. It was my main goal not to be separated ever.”

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When was 11 years old and his brother was 7, a Christian adoption agency brought them to the Kellys. Carter remembered feeling excited at the time.

“It’s a big shot to get adopted,” he said. “It’s really exciting.”

It didn’t take long for that to change, though.

“Like people say, the true colors came out,” Carter said. “The honeymoon cycle is over and, after that, everything went to crap.”

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He claimed the couple sent him down to the basement as a punishment after about 18 months, where there was a bed but no bathroom. The light-switches didn’t work — they were controlled from the outside.

The door to the outside world was locked, and the door to the house was equipped with a motion sensor, prepared to alert the family should he try to leave.

Sometimes, he alleged, he would be locked down there for months at a time. If he needed to use the bathroom, he’d do so in a corner of the room, on the floor.

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“The room stank like piss,” he said. “It was really horrible.”

Sometimes, they would feed him vegetables, which he hated, down there. Sometimes, they would only give him bread and water.

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“They would say, ‘Jesus survived off bread and water, so you can too,”’ he said. “It was like a torture method. They were upstairs eating pizza and Chinese, and I’d be eating bread and water.”

He began chewing his lips until they would bleed, and he claimed the couple would pour salt on the open wounds as punishment.

Eventually, he would show his anger.

“I would bang on the walls just to keep people awake in the house,” Carter told AL.com. “I got aggressive, like, ‘I’m not about to stay down here. Hell no. I wasn’t having it, and think I said I was going to do something to somebody.”

Wearing a hooded letter jacket and a baseball cap in his recorded interview with the newspaper, Carter said, “I felt like a wild animal at any type of affection, after a while. I didn’t really trust anybody.”

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In 2013, Arizona rapper Nick Carter, who goes by Murs, adopted Carter. But not his brother.

“I thought about him every single day,” Carter said. “At that point, I was blaming myself for getting sent away.”

But there wasn’t much he could do, so he “prayed it didn’t happen to him.”

But more was rotten in Carter’s life. A year after his adoption, Murs returned him to the foster care system after he claimed the boy filed false claims of neglect and abuse against him and his wife.

“Nothing was substantiated,” Murs told Contact Music. “We definitely were able to clear it up once we went to court and they came to the house and also saw the damage he did to my property, and they quickly changed their tune.”

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Added Murs, “Even though he filed a false claim on us, I know he’s just angry, I tell him, ‘When you hit rock bottom, I’m there for you so call me.’”

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Now, Carter lives alone in Arizona. Murs and his wife remain Carter’s legal parents. The couple bought him a planet ticket to fly from Arizona to Alabama after his brother was found.

The Kellys were not arrested for any of these allegations, but for the alleged child abuse of his brother. The arrest warrants alleged he was “subjected to forced isolation for extended period of time.”

Two days after the teenager was found, a prayer vigil was held for the boy. Eighty people came to pray on a baseball field in the Helena Sports Complex.

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“We wanted to raise awareness to the unknown things that are going on in our community,” Amanda Shannell told the paper. “When we come together and pray together, miracles can happen.”

For Carter, it seemed as if one did. Sadly, the same couldn’t be said for his brother, who WHNT reported remains hospitalized at Children’s of Alabama.

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Richard and Cynthia Kelly are both being held at the Shelby County Jail, their bonds set at $1 million each.