Investigators came to the home on Thursday and found 12 girls, ranging in age from six months old to 18 years old, living with Kaplan.
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Authorities found 12 girls in Lee Kaplan’s home, including one 18-year-old and her two daughters.
Well, according to police, the parents made a decision to give Kaplan the gift of their 14-year-old daughter after he bailed them out of debt four years ago (because that’s what you usually do in exchange for that). But the internet and her parents’ assumptions were wrong: Pennsylvania’s age of consent is 16, and children ages 13 to 15 can consent to sex only with partners no more than four years older than them.
Another neighbor, Bob Greenfield, said Kaplan seemed “weird” and he now wishes that he also had called authorities. Bucks County Children and Youth Social Services has the children in protective custody and they are living in foster homes in Lancaster.
Kaplan has been charged with statutory sexual assault and aggravated indecent assault, while the Soltzfuses have been charged with child endangerment. They have been charged with endangering the welfare of children.
But one nearby resident, Denise Horst, said she saw the girls often. Hoopes said. He noted that it is possible that the children could identify by the last name Stoltzfus, but not necessarily be related to the suspects.
“The guy drives that creepy blue van”, Betz, 37, told Philly.com of bearded, wild-haired Lee Kaplan, 51, her neighbor in Lower Southampton, just north of Philadelphia.
Kaplan had told neighbors that no children lived with him, according to the complaint.
“They may have been thinking they were homeschooling them, but they were homeschooling correctly they would have been registered with the local school district, which they were not”, Hoopes said.
“We’ve got a ways to go to figure out what’s really going on here”, Heckler said.
“Our resilience comes from within, and it can be amplified or muted by whether a person has support around them”, said Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Authorities now do not have any evidence if the other nine girls were sexually assaulted as well. Police still haven’t found any identification on them or stashed away in some weird shoebox where Kaplan keeps records of his possibly kidnapped or otherwise bartered children. Lawyers for them weren’t listed in court documents.
Police said they investigated the home after a tip that Kaplan had impregnated a teenager.
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– Daniel Stoltzfus has previously said he began questioning his faith after the death of his 14-month-old son, Ephraim, in a forklift accident at their Kirkwood home in May 2001. They were eventually evicted from their home after what they claimed were predatory and abusive tactics employed by private charities serving members of the Amish church.
