Corolla – The discovery of a male adolescent in a fourteen-room rental house in Corolla, North Carolina has raised some disturbing questions in this upscale vacation community.
The Cooper family of Piscataway, NJ was holding a reunion in the home over the weekend of July 4. Fifteen children from eight different families led to some confusion over which child belonged to which set of parents. As Dallas Cooper, Jr. explained, “There were so many kids running around that eventually we stopped worrying about it and just kind of communally watched over them all: feeding, supervising swimming and games, and bedtimes.”
Evidently, nobody claimed the twelve-year-old boy who wore a tattered T-shirt from the rental company and a pair of dirty blue board shorts every day, nobody remarked where he went at bedtime, and nobody except the other kids noticed that he hoarded extra food at every meal.
“Yeah, I seen him stuff three weenies in a grocery bag once and then sneak out of the room,” stated ten-year-old Houston Cooper. “I just figured he had an eating disorder or something, but I never figured out where he took all them weenies.”
Nobody probably would ever have found out, either, had family patriarch Austin Cooper not realized that he had left his glasses on his night stand. The rest of the family had already left the house, but when Austin drove back to retrieve the glasses he found the boy later dubbed “McMansion Boy” cleaning the leftover food from the refrigerator. Mr. Cooper at first thought that one of the other Coopers had left him behind, but upon questioning the boy panicked and disappeared up the stairs.
Authorities later found the boy in an unfinished section of the attic: “He had built quite a den up there,” reported Officer Sleem. “He had a small bed that he had dragged up there from one of the bedrooms, a mini-fridge that he apparently found somewhere beside the road, and a large larder of junk food pilfered from vacationers. He had run an extension cord up there for electricity and a hose for water.”
Social Services took custody of the boy and attempted to identify him and find his parents, but they discovered that the child had limited communication skills. Social Services Media Spokesperson Deena Medea explained, “At first he only pointed and made grunts and snorts, but later we learned that he knew two phrases in English: ‘Go Redskins’ and ‘Go Steelers'”.
Subsequent investigations have led authorities to believe that the boy had been living in the house since he was four, hiding in the attic and mingling with groups large enough that he could go unnoticed. Officer Sleem: “His original family probably became disoriented from too much sun and Corona Lights and simply forgot him when they left the house at the end of their rental week. The little guy has spent years scrounging for food during the day and hiding in the attic at night. It’s like those stories you hear about kids being raised by wolves, only this one was raised by tourists.”
Although protesters have agitated for his re-release back into his natural habitat or into a similar giant rental house, local realty companies are reluctant to accept the accept the responsibility, fearing lawsuits.