What home schooling hides: A boy tortured and starved by his stepmom

Nobody could find Roman Lopez.

His family had searched, taping hand-drawn “missing” posters to telephone poles and driving the streets calling out the 11-year-old’s name. So had many of his neighbors, their flashlights sweeping over the sidewalks as the winter darkness settled on the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The police were searching, too, and now they had returned to the place where Roman had gone missing earlier that day: his family’s rented home in Placerville, Calif. Roman’s stepmother, Lindsay Piper, hesitated when officers showed up at her door the night of Jan. 11, 2020, asking to comb the house again. But she had told them that Roman liked to hide in odd places — even the clothes dryer — and agreed to let them in.

Brock Garvin, Roman’s 15-year-old stepbrother, was sitting in the dimly lit basement when police came downstairs shortly after 10:30 p.m. He ignored them, he said later, watching “Supernatural” on television as three officers began inspecting the black-and-yellow Home Depot storage bins stacked along the back wall.

Brock had no idea what had happened to Roman. But he did know something the police did not: Much of what his mother had said to them that day was a lie.

When she reported Roman’s disappearance, Piper told the police she was home schooling the eight kids in her household. This was technically true. It was also a ruse.

Most schools have teachers, principals, guidance counselors — professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent. Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of such people. That was the case for Piper, whose children were learning less from her about math and history than they were about violence, cruelty and neglect.

Left to their own devices while she lay in bed watching TV crime procedurals, and her husband, Jordan, worked long hours as a utility lineman, their days and nights passed in a penumbral blur of video games, microwave dinners and fistfights. Almost nothing resembling education took place, her sons said. But there was a shared project in which she diligently led her children: the torture of their stepbrother, Roman.

Roman had been a loving, extroverted 7-year-old who obsessed over dinosaurs when Piper came into his life, a mama’s boy perpetually in search of a mother as Jordan, his father, cycled from one broken relationship to the next.

On the day he was reported missing, he was a sixth-grader who weighed only 42 pounds. He had been locked in closets, whipped with extension cords and bound with zip ties, according to police reports and interviews with family members who witnessed his treatment. Unwilling to give him even short breaks from his isolation, Piper kept him in diapers.

The Washington Post reconstructed Piper’s torment of her stepson from hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed law enforcement records, as well as interviews with two of her four biological children, other relatives, friends of the family, neighbors and police officers.

Piper, 41, who is in prison, did not respond to two letters requesting comment for this story. Her former public defender did not return calls or emails. Jordan Piper, 38, also in prison, declined a request to comment through his attorney.

Little research exists on the links between home schooling and child abuse. The few studies conducted in recent years have not shown that home-schooled children are at significantly greater risk of mistreatment than those who attend public, private or charter schools.

But the research also suggests that when abuse does occur in home-school families, it can escalate into especially severe forms — and that some parents exploit lax home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies.

In 2014, a group of pediatricians published a study of more than two dozen tortured children treated at medical centers in Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, Utah and Washington. Among the 17 victims old enough to attend school, eight were home-schooled.

After a home-schooling mother killed her autistic teenager, government analysts in Connecticut gathered data from six school districts over three years. Their report, released in 2018 by the state’s Office of the Child Advocate, found that 138 of the 380 students withdrawn from public schools for home education during that period lived in households with at least one prior complaint of suspected abuse or neglect.

Child-welfare advocates have long pushed for a minimal level of oversight for home-schooled students — calls that have grown more urgent as home schooling has exploded, becoming the country’s fastest growing form of education. But home-school parents, arguing that serious episodes of abuse are rare, have fiercely resisted. And nowhere have their efforts been more successful than in the state where Roman and his siblings spent most of their lives: Michigan.

Michigan is one of 11 states in which parents are not even required to tell anyone they are home schooling, let alone demonstrate they are teaching their children anything. Its lack of regulation, the result of a 1993 state Supreme Court decision still celebrated by home-school advocates, has repeatedly concealed the actions of abusive parents like Piper.

“She told people we were home-schooled, but we weren’t,” Carson Garvin, one of Roman’s stepbrothers, now 16, later wrote in a victim impact statement. “Now I can see it wasn’t for us that she made this decision. It was to protect herself from the school counselors and staff. I believe that if we had went to school that someone would have had a feeling that something was off and that she would have been reported at some point.”

Despite what Piper told the police, Roman had never really liked hiding. The truth was that he had been hidden. And home schooling is what allowed her to hide him.

As Brock Garvin sat in the basement watching TV on the night of Roman’s disappearance, listening to the police officers banter as they opened the Tough Storage Tote bins, he was in a fog. He had been up all night playing “Dark Souls” on his Xbox, and was upset that he hadn’t been allowed to sleep for most of the day, as he usually did.

He was also jarred by the entrance of unknown grown-ups into the house. The family had moved to California from Michigan just a few months earlier. Long isolated, they were now strangers to everyone around them.

But Brock wasn’t worried about Roman. If his stepbrother had run away, whatever he found could hardly be worse than what he had escaped.

Then the lid on one last bin snapped open, and the officers’ laughter stopped.

Even in his benumbed state Brock felt something strange pass through the room, as if the air pressure had suddenly dropped. It was quiet for a moment, then the police began pulling on latex gloves.

‘I’ll behave’

Roman loved being alive. It was a strange thing to say about an infant, but that was Jennifer Morasco’s first impression of the sunny 5-month-old boy who would become her stepson when she married Jordan Piper in 2010.

“He’d be teething, but he wouldn’t cry,” recalled Morasco, now 41. “He was just so happy to be in existence, and loved being around people and doing stuff with everyone.”

Roman’s mother, Rochelle Lopez, was a soldier who deployed to Iraq when he was 14 months old. After returning, she struggled with heart problems, anxiety and addiction to pain medication, according to police records. Lopez, who died in 2021 at age 34, fought with Jordan in court for years over custody of Roman.

But none of that seemed to weigh on the boy that Morasco largely raised until he was about 4 years old. Morasco still remembers the lyrics to “Life is a Highway,” a song from Roman’s favorite movie, “Cars,” that he sang over and over. Another favorite was “Rainbow Connection,” the banjo-accompanied Muppet ode to life’s unfulfilled promises.

“He thought he was Kermit the Frog, essentially,” Morasco said.

Even after Morasco left Jordan Piper, she kept in touch with Roman, calling every year on his birthday. But in 2016, Jordan wasn’t picking up his phone, so she tried sending a Facebook message to Roman’s new stepmom, asking her to tell him “he is loved all the way to the moon and back.”

Lindsay Piper reacted harshly, warning Morasco not to contact her again and boasting that Roman “has excelled in ways I can’t begin to explain.”

Piper herself had barely graduated high school, according to her sister, Chanel Campbell. Her interest was never in academics; it was in babies. It wasn’t an unusual fixation for a young girl, but there was something off-kilter about the intensity that Lindsay brought to her aspirations of motherhood, her sister said.

“She carried a baby doll around with her until she was, like, 12,” said Campbell, who was raised with her sister in and around Flint. “She just had this fascination with baby dolls and dressing them up and changing them and putting them in diapers.” This treatment extended to the family’s miniature schnauzer, which Lindsay forced into footed pajamas.

By the time she married Jordan Piper, Lindsay had four children of her own. Their father, Marcus Garvin, was an infantryman in the Army and Army National Guard. He returned from his service in Iraq to years of marital turmoil with Lindsay, who eventually gained full custody of their children. After marrying Jordan, she became the parent of a fifth: her stepson, Roman.

In Piper’s frequent Facebook posts, they were a happily blended family, all beaming smiles and matching flannel shirts. But Campbell knew this image was no more real than the dolls her sister had once carried around. At family gatherings, Piper’s children tended to run wild, and she responded in disturbing ways: pinching them, or biting them on their forearms. When Campbell protested, she said, her sister would storm off.

Reached by phone, Piper’s mother, the guardian of Carson’s twin brother, initially said she would consider speaking to The Post but did not respond to subsequent calls or text messages. Piper’s eldest daughter, now 21, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Shortly after her marriage to Jordan, Piper started to complain about her boys’ experience at their elementary school.

“She said, ‘I’m just going to home-school them. I’m tired of the teachers singling them out. I’m tired of everyone picking on them,’” Campbell recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘You’re definitely right. We’ve got a problem here. But home schooling isn’t going to be the answer to it.’”

Between late 2016 and the summer of 2017, Piper withdrew the children from school, Brock and Carson said. With the exception of a few brief interludes when they were sent back for days or weeks, they would not regularly attend school again for the next five years.

At first, they sporadically logged on to an online learning program, Brock and Carson recalled. Then any pretense of education was dropped.

Piper spent the day watching “Criminal Minds” and “Law & Order,” her sons said, and in the evenings, when Jordan returned from work, the couple would sit around drinking Jack Daniels.

By this time, the family had moved to Gaines, a tiny town amid soybean fields about 20 miles southwest of Flint. At midday, the sound of children at recess echoed past their house from the elementary school three blocks away. But for Piper’s kids, the high-pitched laughter and shouting might as well have come from another planet.

“My world got very, very small,” recalled Brock, who was then 12. “I wouldn’t see the sun or moon. I would just be in my room 24/7.” He at least had his Xbox; Carson had his twin brother. Roman had nothing and nobody, because the things that made him human were methodically stripped away.

It happened slowly, his stepbrothers said. Early on, when the boys scuffled, Piper blamed Roman, the one to whom she had not given birth, punishing him with lengthy timeouts. Then she began locking the door to his room. Then she began covering his window with a blanket.

“He would sit in the dark on his bed all day. And she would have us, like, scratch on the walls and make creepy noises so he’d think there’s demons trying to kill him,” said Brock, who expressed deep regret about participating. “He’d sit there and scream, like, ‘Stop it, please’ or ‘I’ll behave’ … that was his life.”

Soon there was no disciplinary pretext for the harm inflicted on Roman, Carson and Brock said. It was simply what the family did. Piper ordered her sons to join in when she whipped him with phone charger cords. Roman began trying to escape, so she tied him down. She took away his clothes. Most of her kids were overweight, but Roman was put on something worse than a starvation diet.

“She would feed him oatmeal with huge amounts of salt in it,” Carson said. “He puked it up, so he wouldn’t have to keep eating it. And she would make him eat his puke.”

Campbell suspected there was something badly wrong inside her sister’s house. She said that after seeing bruises on Roman’s face at a Christmas get-together in 2016, she called child protective services.

She made two follow-up calls, she said, but could never determine whether any action was taken. Police later said they found no records of CPS investigations into Piper’s treatment of Roman. A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees such investigations — declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of child-welfare cases.

Roman kept appearing in Piper’s Facebook photos, increasingly wraithlike beside his grinning siblings.

“He was just lifeless, just sad. You could just see it in his face, aside from the puffy eyes and the bruising on his forehead,” Campbell said. “The love had been sucked out of him.”

It seemed unimaginable that a child could fall so completely through the safety net because a parent like Piper decided to home-school. But in Michigan, it had happened before.

‘A shield for child abuse’

About two years before Roman was withdrawn from school, an eviction crew entered Mitchelle Blair’s Detroit apartment on March 24, 2015. The 35-year-old mother of four wasn’t home, so they began removing her furniture. But their work came to an abrupt halt when they opened a deep freezer in the living room: inside were the bodies of two children.

Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry — estimated to have been ages 13 and 9 when their mother killed them — had been pulled out of Detroit public schools with their siblings two years earlier. During Blair’s conviction and sentencing to life in prison for first-degree murder, it emerged that she had burned her children with scalding water and beaten them with wooden planks.

She also claimed to be home-schooling them.

Stephanie Chang, then a freshman Democratic state representative whose district included the site of the murders, was horrified by the case. She was also alarmed by what she perceived as a yawning gap in the state’s child protection system.

It wasn’t just Stoni and Stephen. Seven years earlier, there had been Calista Springer, a home-schooled 16-year-old who died in a house fire in Centreville, Mich., unable to free herself from a choke chain her parents used to tie her to her bed. Marsha and Anthony Springer were convicted of torture and child abuse and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.

Chang understood such cases didn’t represent most children’s home-schooling experiences. But she also believed abusive parents were taking advantage of Michigan’s absence of any notification or monitoring requirements for home educators, with devastating consequences.

“There are so many amazing home-school parents who I have so much respect for. But when people use home schooling as a shield for child abuse, that’s not acceptable,” said Chang, now a state senator. “That lack of a notification requirement creates an environment where parents can basically just do whatever they want.”

It is a concern that extends beyond Michigan, and that pediatricians share with politicians.

In 2013, a group of North Carolina doctors published case studies on “invisible children” who suffered severe abuse while being home-schooled. They acknowledged that “home-school advocates may feel unjustly linked to child abuse” but advised state officials to consider a better registration system and additional oversight measures, such as home visits.

“Home schooling, at times, can allow parents to create this isolation of the child,” said Meggan Goodpasture, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and lead author of the case studies. “What we do know is that school personnel are big reporters, statistically speaking, of abuse and neglect.”

A month after Mitchelle Blair’s children were discovered dead in Detroit, Chang introduced a bill requiring that parents notify their local school district of a decision to home-school and that home-schooled children meet at least twice a year with a mandated child abuse reporter, such as a teacher, doctor or psychologist.

“It’s such a common-sense thing, in my view,” Chang said.

The legislation was supported by the state board of education, which said it had “long been concerned that there is no way to know who is being homeschooled.” But home-schoolers in Michigan — and across the country — fought back.

Chang’s office was flooded with hundreds of calls. Angry home-school parents from around the state started showing up at her fellow legislators’ constituent coffee hours. The nation’s most powerful home-school advocacy group, the Home School Legal Defense Association, attacked the proposal from its headquarters in Northern Virginia.

The bill never got a hearing. Israel Wayne, vice president of the Michigan Christian Homeschool Network — the state’s oldest and largest home-schooling group — said that’s a good thing.

“Families should be prosecuted if they are abusing their children. But we have very adequate abuse laws that are already on the books,” Wayne said. “Our view would be that to create additional burdens and regulations and red tape for all home-schoolers in the state is not productive, and would not reduce child abuse.”

Wayne said the deaths of Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry resulted not from home schooling but from failures of the state’s child protective services workers, who had investigated their mother repeatedly before their deaths. And in the eight years since their murders, he added, “you have not heard of any home-schooling families abusing their children” in Michigan.

Wayne said he had never heard of Roman Lopez, who was as invisible to his state’s home-schooling community as he was to everyone else.

A boy is found

Detective Luke Gadow stared at the child who lay curled on his right side at the bottom of a 55-gallon storage container in the Pipers’ Placerville basement.

The boy was gaunt and wore nothing but a diaper. His exposed skin had taken on a chalky hue, and some blood had dribbled from his nose. One of the police officers with Gadow knelt and placed his fingers on the child’s neck, confirming what they knew already: Roman Lopez was dead.

Lindsay and Jordan Piper were taken to the police department for questioning, the children to an emergency youth shelter. In addition to her four biological children and Roman, there were three other young children living in the Piper home — the oldest was 7 — who Piper said had been left in her care by a struggling friend in Flint.

Everyone in the family told investigators they had no idea how Roman wound up dead in the basement, records of their interviews show.

Piper described herself as “a full-time mother” who “taught their children through home schooling.” But something seemed wrong. The kids’ statements were so similar that Gadow suspected they had been coached. Before the body was found, Piper had been unable to furnish any recently worn clothes of Roman’s that might provide a scent for a search-and-rescue dog, not even shoes.

“I had a bad feeling,” Gadow, now a police sergeant, later recalled. “You know, the little spidey senses tingling.”

That feeling was confirmed as photos, videos and text messages — described in forensic analysis reports obtained by The Post — were pulled from the family’s phones and laptops.

In one video, a woman who sounded like Piper was yelling at Roman, calling him a “retard” and saying, “I want to punch you in the face.” In a text to her teenage daughter, Piper wrote, “And Roman is a dick! I’m excited to come back to whoop that ass lol.” A photo on Piper’s phone showed Roman naked in a closet, his arms zip-tied to metal grid shelves.

Sometimes the family casually discussed their concern that while they slept, Roman was escaping from his confinement to scavenge, once eating a packet of raw ramen. In July 2019, before they left Michigan, Brock texted his mother.

Piper’s text messages to her daughter also shed light on a question that bedeviled the early phase of the investigation: how, exactly, Roman died. The medical examiner in El Dorado County determined that while he was dehydrated and severely malnourished — at 11, Roman weighed about as much as a 6-year-old — he had no obvious wounds.

Murder would be difficult to prove without a cause of death. Then, one day, Gadow was going over Roman’s toxicology report, painstakingly checking the levels of every substance found in his blood. One was elevated far above a safe range: sodium.

Roman had been poisoned with table salt, investigators concluded, a substance so commonplace that it had almost been overlooked. Sure enough, Piper had left a trail of text messages to her daughter discussing plans to add extra salt to Roman’s food. Roman’s final hours were not pleasant to contemplate: Excess blood sodium, or hypernatremia, can lead to seizures, delirium and finally death.

The investigation had taken time — delayed, in part, by the start of the pandemic, but also by the case’s complexity and the family’s lack of cooperation. And Roman was not the only victim in the house.

One of the three young children Piper had informally adopted showed severe bruising on her hips and buttocks. A search of Jordan’s devices revealed that he had installed a hidden camera in the bathroom and recorded his teen stepdaughter showering, according to forensic reports.

In February 2021 — just over a year after Roman’s death — Lindsay and Jordan Piper were arrested at a motel in rural Calaveras County, Calif.

Lindsay pleaded no contest to a charge of second-degree murder last year and was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. Jordan pleaded guilty in October to the same charge and is awaiting sentencing. He is already serving a 15-year sentence after pleading guilty to a federal charge of sexually exploiting a child.

Jordan’s mother, Jackie Farah, told The Post that Jordan should have protected Roman, but that he does not share Lindsay’s culpability in his son’s death.

“He is guilty for what he didn’t do, not for what he did do,” Farah said. “He is not the monster that put my grandchild in that damn box.”

The eight children in the Piper household were scattered. The three youngest were sent to live with an aunt in Michigan. Lindsay’s eldest daughter — now raising a young child of her own — returned to the Flint area. Carson’s twin went to live with Lindsay’s mother.

Brock and Carson were placed with their father, who hadn’t been part of their lives in a long time. What lay ahead seemed almost as terrifying as what they’d left behind.

It was time for them to go back to school.

School day

Just before 6 a.m. on a fall Tuesday, a bleary-eyed Carson trudged down the stairs of his home in Davison, Mich., and pulled on a pair of Nikes. His half sister, Reagan, 9, was at the kitchen counter, bent over a worksheet titled “Angles and Quadrilaterals.” He glanced at her as he began rinsing plates in the sink.

“Reagan, can you unload the dishwasher?”

“I’m busy right now,” she replied.

“What are you doing?”

“My homework. I didn’t have time to do it last night.”

Ginger, the family’s dog, watched the exchange from the living room, wagging her tail as she perched over a Joe Biden chew toy. The dog was in high spirits: She loved a full house, and Brock was home on leave from his Army base in New York.

“I’ll tell Brock,” Carson warned. “He’s going to send you to jail.”

“He can’t do that.”

From the basement, Brock’s sleepy voice called up: “You’re going to jail!”

“I know you’re lying to me,” Reagan called back.

It was late September, more than three years after the body of Brock’s and Carson’s stepbrother had been found in another basement, in a very different house.

In that other home, the boys had slept as late as they wanted, often into the afternoon. In this one, the sun wasn’t up when Carson rose from bed to begin his school day.

Marcus Garvin had not seen his sons in five years when Piper’s sister called him with the news that Roman had been found dead. He filed an emergency petition in Michigan to regain custody, but it was not until after his ex-wife’s arrest that the boys were sent to live with him and Reagan, his daughter from another marriage.

In a video call shortly before he flew to California, Garvin, a muscular and thickly tattooed 42-year-old, warned Brock and Carson that their lives would soon be changing.

“You’re going to school every day,” he said. “Like a normal kid.”

Carson held himself together until they were off the call, then turned to Brock.

“I don’t think I can do this,” he said.

But he could.

In Davison, a middle-class Flint suburb of aboveground pools and heavily attended high school football games, Garvin began to lead his two obese sons on jogs around the neighborhood. He enrolled them in therapy three times a week. Gradually, they returned to healthy weights and healthy routines. Carson enrolled at Davison Middle School, then at Davison High. He got A’s and B’s and joined the high school soccer team.

Brock’s path was less straightforward. The last time he had regularly sat in a classroom, he was 12. When he came to live with his dad, he was 17. He had no realistic way to prepare for his senior year of high school, so he worked online toward a GED. On his third attempt, he passed, and then he joined the Army, becoming a military police officer.

“It’s kind of a way to help even out what Lindsay did,” he said recently, describing his aspirations for a career in law enforcement. “I want to be able to help people.”

But Brock, like his brother, still struggles with the memory of the person he did not help. Honesty is a trait Garvin encourages in his rescued sons, and they say the truth is that they bear some responsibility for what happened to Roman.

“I could have stopped it, and that’s just what gets me,” Brock said. “At any moment, if I wasn’t so content sitting and playing video games all day — like, I could have called the cops.”

In his statement at his mother’s sentencing hearing — read aloud on his behalf because he was unable to speak through his tears — Carson wrestled with his complicated role as both victim and accomplice.

“I was afraid at the time that if I didn’t do what she told me to do, it would be me locked in that box or closet next,” he wrote. “I participated in this abuse, and I cannot ever go back in time and find the strength to stand up to her.”

Garvin marvels at how his sons have thrived in a world of schedules and expectations. Brock’s enlistment filled him with pride. Carson had come a long way from the days when the sight of a school bus was enough to send him running into the house in panic.

But as a combat veteran of the Iraq War, Garvin knows that trauma’s effects are long-lasting and not always predictable. The boys, he says, “were both very close to not having a future.”

The street was dark and quiet when Carson slipped out the front door about 6:15 a.m., munching on a hastily assembled sandwich of Country Crock and wheat toast. He walked to the corner in their newly built subdivision, stepping around a child’s bike that had been left on the sidewalk.

Headlights swept the sides of houses as cars eased out of their driveways. Carson watched in silence as a new and larger set of headlights appeared at the end of the block, and a moment later, he boarded a yellow bus with black letters across its side: “Davison Community Schools.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.