A week after a Chicago man was jailed for posting to Facebook a photo showing his daughter bound and gagged with painter’s tape, an Arizona couple was arrested yesterday for uploading similarly disturbing photos of their two young children bound with duct tape.
After being tipped to the Facebook photos, cops arrested Frankie Almuina, 20, and Kayla Almuina, 19, on felony child abuse charges. The married suspects are pictured in the mug shots at right.
According to a Coconino County Sheriff’s Office report, the photos showed two children--a 10-month-old girl and a two-year-old boy--with duct tape around their ankles and wrists. Their mouths were also taped shut. In one image, the boy is seen hanging upside down from a piece of exercise equipment.
The children--neither of whom was harmed by the taping--have been placed in the custody of their paternal grandparents, according to sheriff’s officials. The Almuinas are both being held in the Flagstaff jail in lieu of $25,000 bail, records show.
During an interview yesterday with deputies, Kayla Almuina insisted that the duct-taping of the children “was all in good fun.” She even showed cops photos on her cell phone that depicted her infant daughter “with tape over her mouth and tape around her wrists." In the sheriff's report, a deputy wrote that, “I could only describe a ‘look of terror’ in her eyes. She was obviously upset in these photographs.”
Almuina said that her husband had put the tape on their children, while she snapped the photos that were later uploaded to Facebook. Following that admission, the couple was placed under arrest and handcuffed.
In a subsequent interview, Almuina said that her son Lorenzo was playing with the tape when her husband decided to bind him. At one point, she added, Frankie Almuina hung his son “upside down by his ankles” from “a weight machine located in the living room.”
When asked why her daughter appeared to be crying in the photos, Almuina explained that the infant “had shots that day and was generally in a poor mood.” She also contended that the taping “was not in any way a punishment and was done in fun as a game.”
Frankie Almuina told investigators that he was “playing with the kids and decided to tape them up.” Noting that “this is something that he had done at least one time previously,” Almuina acknowledged that he had placed his children (pictured above) in danger and that they would “not be able to break these bonds if for some reason they needed or wanted to.”
Last week, a 21-year-old Chicago man was charged with felony domestic battery for allegedly using painter's tape to bind his one-year-old daughter’s wrists, ankles, and mouth. Andre Curry then posted a photo of the bound girl to his Facebook page. The disturbing image, taken on December 13, prompted outrage from Curry’s Facebook friends, one of who apparently contacted authorities.
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