MARGATE, Fla. – A former counselor for a child abuse nonprofit failed to report that her 15-year-old cousin was living in a house of torture in Margate for about a decade and she used her knowledge of the system to try to help one of the abusers, detectives alleged in an arrest warrant.
Treaunshae Gibbons, the family support counselor who was arrested on Thursday, had lived in that house of torture herself with her mother, Latricia Crawley, who was the abuse victim’s legal guardian, from 2015 to 2019 and continued to visit the home regularly after she moved out, records show.
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“Gibbons’ position provided ample opportunity to make a reasonable effort to protect the child victim,” Margate police Detective Joshua Baer, the lead investigator in the case, wrote in an unredacted warrant obtained on Monday.
The Broward State Attorney’s Office released a heavily-redacted warrant on Thursday that excluded specific details about the 29-year-old’s alleged knowledge of the abuse and how she’s alleged to have used her work experience in an attempt to aid her mother.
In the house of torture, detectives said they found 74-year-old Horace Crawley, a registered sex offender who had not reported where he was living, records show. Latricia Crawley, 46; her husband, Benjamin Lockett, 43; and the victim’s 20-year-old sister Shankyria Clayton, were accused of caging and starving the teen.
The girl’s aunt and uncle, Latricia Crawley and Lockett, who detectives arrested in late October, had used rope to bind her, locked her in a closet and threw boiling water on her at the house along Northwest 79th Terrace. Police arrested Clayton and Horace Crawley a little more than a week later.
The investigation began after the teenage girl reported the abuse to an online instructor.
Gibbons had experience working as a dependency case manager for two other organizations when Kids in Distress, Inc., a Wilton Manors-based nonprofit organization that aims to prevent child abuse, hired her as a family support counselor in November 2020, police said.
The victim told police that at one point, Gibbons confronted her mother and “expressed her dissatisfaction” after witnessing her strike the 15-year-old girl in the head in an argument that nearly turned physical, the warrant states. But police said Gibbons never reported what happened to authorities.
Instead of using her training and experience to help her cousin, Baer wrote that that a recorded phone call showed that Gibbons used “her understanding of investigative procedures” to give Latricia Crawley “advice on how to interact with the police during this investigation,” acting as a “middleman” between her mother and law enforcement.
The organization’s CEO confirmed Thursday that Gibbons was fired prior to her arrest Thursday, after staff learned about her connection with the ongoing case. He said Gibbons’ arrest was “unrelated” to her work at the organization.
Prosecutors charged her with child neglect causing great bodily harm and failing to report child abuse and she was released on an $80,000 bond after a judge ordered her to wear a GPS monitor and stay away from minors — except for her children.
Crawley and Lockett are facing charges of child abuse causing great bodily harm and child neglect causing great bodily harm, and Clayton was charged with aggravated child abuse, child neglect causing great bodily harm, and failing to report abuse. They have also since bonded out.
While Horace Crawley’s charges are unrelated to the abuse allegations — and instead pertain to sex offender registration violations — police did not rule out the possibility of additional charges following his November arrest.
Horace Crawley remained jailed in Broward’s Paul Rein Detention Facility on Monday.