Four people locked away in dungeon

THE SOUND OF a dog yapping on Saturday morning led landlord Turgut Gozleveli down into the lower basement of the Northeast Philadelphia apartment building he owned, down to an abandoned boiler room that was bizarrely locked shut with a chain wrapped around the door handle.

Gozleveli, 71, unwrapped the chain and opened the door, smelling urine and the earthiness of the dirt floor mixed into something he could only describe as a "horrible smell, like unexpected, like undesirable smell - the urine smell."

In the dark, with the light from his flashlight, he saw two little dogs, like Chihuahuas, blankets, pillows and makeshift mattresses. He pulled one blanket up and was stunned to see two faces - a man's and a woman's.

"I said, 'What the hell you guys doing there?' " Gozleveli, originally from Turkey, recalled yesterday in a heavily accented voice during a phone interview. "There was no answer. Then I closed the door and called police."

Gozleveli, who doesn't live in the tan stucco apartment building on Longshore Avenue near Vandike Street in Tacony, called 9-1-1 about 10:30 a.m. Saturday. He said that at first he thought the people were in the basement sheltering from the cold and the rain, but that he didn't know how they got there.

After police arrived, he led them back down to the sub-basement, where police found four people being held captive - one chained by his ankle to the old, metal boiler.

All four victims - a woman, 29, and three men, 31, 35 and 41 - were discovered to have mental disabilities, said police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers. The oldest man was the one shackled.

"They had bedsores, were very, very thin," he said. "Physically, they did not look in good condition. They were definitely malnourished."

"The responding officers knew right away" that they were "dealing with special-needs people," Evers said, adding that the captives were locked in what looked like "a dungeon" with a bucket of urine and feces inside.

Gozleveli said it was after police came that he found another dog - a large, quiet one that didn't bark - in the upper basement, above where the captives and two small dogs were found. That room was dark, the lightbulbs missing from the ceiling.

The victims were taken to Aria Health Frankford, where they were treated and then released Saturday night into a city mental-health facility, said Evers.