Teen tortured in his own Hernando home

Spring Hill, Florida -- "Prisoners in GITMO don't receive this kind of treatment. And this is a kid."

Those are the words of Hernando County Sheriff Richard Nugent who thought he'd seen it all.

Until this week, when his deputies discovered a 16-year-old boy who had been held captive and beaten in his own home for at least two years.

Deputies blame the boy's adoptive mother, 51-year-old Tailing Gigliotti. They say she would put the boy in the bathroom, with the window boarded up, and the door screwed shut from the outside.

On Monday, somehow, the boy broke out of the bathroom and escaped to a neighbor's house.

The boy is now safe in state custody.

"We found the hose he was beaten with and the piece of wood he was beaten with. There was still blood on both of those objects," said Nugent.

Gigliotti turned herself in a day after deputies found the boy. She was arrested on charges of aggravated child abuse and false imprisonment. She got out of jail Tuesday night on a $15,000 bond.

10 Connects tried to get the Gigliotti's side of the story but no one answered our knocks.

Neighbors, however, wanted to talk and told 10 Connects they had their suspicions. Pat Guttman lives next door to the Gigliotti residence. "She was very militant, argumentative. I felt sorry for the boy. She never let him play with other children... I kept saying I'm going to call, I'm going to call. My son said, 'You can't We don't have proof,' but I just had a feeling something was going on."

Neighbor James Johnson says he did not see the boy often but he did notice that the boy did not wait at the bus stop with the other kids.

Deputies say the boy was enrolled at Powell Middle School in Spring Hill but he had not been to school in the past two years.

While neighbors did not know exactly what was going on, Gigliotti's live-in boyfriend, Anton Angello, may have known. "There's no way this guy could have lived in this house and not know," said Nugent. Deputies are working on warrants for Angello's involvement in the abuse.

Plus, one of the deputies who responded to the scene said he overheard Gigliotti on her cell phone saying to someone, 'He must have escaped or gotten out.'

Before Angello, Gigliotti was married to the late Anthony Gigliotti who was a well-known musician for the Philadephia Orchestra. That is why she owned a music store in Brooksville called Gigliotti's Music Shop. 10 Connects went by the store but it was closed.

The boy told deputies the reason he kept quiet was because he is not a US citizen and Gigliotti threatened him with deportation if he tried to run away.

Click here to read Gigliotti's arrest affidavit. (PDF)