The parents of a ten-year-old girl will spend the rest of their lives in prison after the little girl, who was abused along with her siblings for years, was killed in a house fire.
Zoe McCue died from smoke inhalation when her family home in Gwinnett County, Georgia, burned down on Easter Sunday in 2022.
She had been sleeping on a plywood slab placed over a tub in a locked, windowless bathroom of the house. The disturbing setup served as her makeshift bedroom.
On Thursday, Zoe’s father, 51-year-old William Linn McCue, was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without parole, a fourth life sentence and an additional 120 years in prison.
McCue was found guilty of felony murder, rape, aggravated child molestation and incest in connection with the death of his ten-year-old daughter and the abuse he subjected her and her siblings to.
The children’s mother, Carina Wisniewski McCue, 38, was sentenced to 90 years in prison. She pleaded guilty to first-degree cruelty to children and several other charges, and testified against her husband in court.
After the parents were sentenced, Gwinnett District Attorney Patsy Austin-Gatson said in a statement: ‘The treatment of these children was horrible.
‘This child’s death was unconscionable and preventable, and she and her siblings deserved better than they received from their parents,’ Austin-Gatson said, according to a news release from the Gwinnett County District Attorney.
William Linn McCue, 52, received multiple life sentences and an additional 120 years in prison for sexually abusing his daughter, who died in a house fire in the family’s home in 2022
The parents went on the run after their home burned down. Authorities searched for the McCues for months, from early May when they obtained warrants until late June when the parents were finally caught.
During the father’s trial, the extensive abuse suffered by the family’s five children was revealed by prosecutors. They were routinely beaten, forced to wear shock collars, made to stand on cinder blocks for hours to days and had to use buckets as toilets.
The oldest child, a 17-year-old girl at the time of the fire, told investigators that she and her sisters had been abused by their father since they were little girls.
When investigators began looking into the circumstances of the house fire, they found the parents were ‘recluses’ who never let anyone into their filthy, squalid home with living conditions deemed to be ‘unsanitary and dangerous’.
Toilets in the home did not work. Neither did the septic tank, showers, taps or bathtubs.
Police said that some of the children did not even know how to use toilet paper and had not been to school in years.
When the house fire started four years ago, Carina McCue was able to rescue her then-12-year-old and eight-year-old sons, but she was unable to reach Zoe in time.
The father and the family’s oldest children, a 15-year-old boy and the 17-year-old girl, were not home at the time.
The boy was initially considered missing but was soon located at a nearby church. During the father’s trial, it was revealed that the 15-year-old had started the fire as an ‘outcry.’
The boy had been attempting to escape the abuse he and his siblings had suffered for years at the hands of their parents, district attorney’s office spokesperson Marcus Garner told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The boy was charged with murder, but the case was soon dismissed. ‘Since it was determined to be an “outcry for help” the murder charges were not pursued,’ Garner told the outlet.
He added that shortly after the fire, all of the surviving children except the 15-year-old, who was facing charges at the time, were put into protective custody. They have all ‘flourished’ without their parents, Garner said.
The McCues were investigated by the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services twice before the fatal fire four years ago, once in 2015 and once in 2019, but the children were not removed from their parents’ custody either time.
