A South Carolina woman was arrested Thursday for allegedly locking her boyfriend in a storage unit for days without food or water.
Robin Renae Deaton, 52, was charged with attempted murder and kidnapping, the Monroe Police Department said in a statement.
A week earlier, after an argument, Deaton allegedly slammed the storage unit door shut while her boyfriend was inside, declaring, “This is what you get,” he later told police. For four days, the man was trapped in a “hoarder’s paradise,” unable to locate his phone in the dark.
He eventually found his phone on Monday and was able to call for help.
“I’ve been locked in a storage unit for about a week now, and I’ve just now found my phone,” he told a 911 dispatcher, according to audio obtained by ABC News. “My girlfriend locked me in here. She doubled up my lock, and I don’t know how she put me in it but she put me in here.”
He told police that Deaton had asked him to get something from the back of the storage unit, then shut him in while he was fetching it, according to Queen City News.
“I just need out of here, I can’t breathe,” he told the dispatcher. “I haven’t had nothing to drink or anything.”
When arriving officers opened the storage unit door, “things started to fall out,” Monroe Police Lt. Morgan Malone told Queen City News. “The further they opened it, more stuff fell out.”
The man was treated for dehydration at a hospital and released. He later told police he thought Deaton didn’t realize he was in there, but police said her behavior indicated otherwise.
“We believe that she truly intended for him to die in that storage unit with no food and no water, no outside source of anything,” Malone said, noting that men, too, can be victims of domestic violence. “She knew she locked him in there and never went back to check on him.”
People in the vicinity had no idea someone was trapped nearby.
“It’s a shock, considering we work across the street and we didn’t know this poor man was in the building literally suffering,” bystander Lindsay Champion told WBTV. “Not knowing, that’s scary.”