TRENTON, New Jersey – One evening last week, a barefoot teenage girl with a shaved head burst into her next-door neighbor’s home in Blackwood, New Jersey, sat down on the couch and began to spill out a harrowing story.

She said her stepfather and mother had imprisoned her at their home for the past seven years, ever since they pulled her out of elementary school with the excuse that she would be home-schooled.

She said they locked her in a dog crate for an entire year and, at one point, had chained her up in a bathroom. She said her stepfather had sexually abused her.

This week, following a police investigation, prosecutors in Camden County, in South Jersey just outside Philadelphia, announced several charges against her mother, Brenda Spencer, 38; and stepfather, Branndon Mosely, 41.

They included assault, criminal restraint, kidnapping and weapons offences; Mosely also faces numerous counts of sexual assault.

“The investigation has corroborated the heinous acts endured by the victim, and we will hold those responsible accountable,” Lieutenant Andy McNeil, a spokesperson for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, said in an interview.

The authorities did not identify the 18-year-old teenager.

Mosely is a rail conductor for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, the transit system that serves the Philadelphia region, and Spencer is a dog handler who specialises in Great Danes, the authorities said.

They are being held in jail while they await a detention hearing scheduled for next week. Lawyers for the couple declined to comment.

‘I wish I had known’

Days after the distressed teenage girl barreled into the home where he was staying, Mr Michael Lacey, a 36-year-old pool cleaner, said he kept breaking down in tears over the brutality she had described.

She recounted to Mr Lacey how an alarm system was rigged so she could not escape. How her mother shaved her head as punishment and how she was forced to relieve herself in a bucket. And she explained to Mr Lacey that it all happened behind closed doors, just 20 yards away from the house he was staying in, which belonged to his mother.

“After I found out that everything she was telling me was true, I broke down,” Mr Lacey said in an interview. “I wish I had known. I wish I had known.”

The region has recently been shaken by an eerily similar episode in which a 32-year-old Connecticut man escaped from what he said was 20 years of impr...