GLEN ST. MARY, Fla. -- He spent three months chained to the floor of a mobile home, alone on a filthy mattress, with anger building by the day.
"I just really don't want to talk about it," said Brandon Howell.
Finally free, the experience is still too painful for Brandon to talk about. Even though the chain is no longer wrapped around his neck, the 18-year-old said he's still locked out of his life...
"Not being able to see my brother and sister... it's just really hard to explain. I just need my brother and sister back," he said.
His 13-year-old sister and 16-year-old brother are in foster care while Brandon stays with family friends, disconnected from his family because of his age.
"Eric likes to eat pizza sometimes, Madison likes spaghetti. Eric's a baseball fanatic, Madison, she says she's not a girly girl, but I think she's a girly girl," he said.
On a purple piece of stationary, with animals and hearts, it was that girly girl who first had the courage to speak out against the abuse. "Dear Aunt Christina, I don't want to live with Uncle Troy anymore, but I don't know what to do," it read.
Addressed to a family friend this summer, Brandon's little sister said that she was scared, and wanted a real family.
She found her voice a few weeks later at the end of October when she spoke up about the abuse to a school counselor who sent detectives to her home. "It must have been pretty hard because she told me one day she was going to the school to talk to them, and then the next day after she told me, there they were up at the front," he said.
Police found Brandon with bruises around his neck and a swollen eye, a chain on top of a thin mattress in a small room that Brandon called home.
Troy Howell got custody of the three children after his father, their grandfather, died in 2009. He had custody of the three after both of their parents left.
Maddy's letter describes how he was their only option. It read: "Please help me."
Ever since our grandpa died, she's been getting a little less happy, and so have I," said Brandon, who is now staying with Christina and Tommy Shirley, the couple Maddy wrote to.
They are fighting for custody of Maddy and her 16-year-old brother. "We're doing everything we can. Everything we're doing is for them, everything," said Tommy Shirley.
A family court judge has temporarily barred the Shirleys, or anyone who knew the family, from having contact with Brandon's brother and sister.
"I'd just like to see the kids, us, everybody spend time together if we could," said Shirley.
Shirley said the current foster parents have been unresponsive, sending Brandon away when he tries to visit, and refusing to give out their phone number.
"Now that I'm not with my brother and sister, it's just like, what's the point," asked Brandon.
Department of Children and Family Services spokesman John Harrell said this has been a difficult case to process. "They all went through such a terrible ordeal. But there are legitimate safety concerns," said Harrell.
According to Harrell, the foster parents are extending that caution to the 18-year-old victim. By law, they don't have to allow him contact with his brother and sister.
"It is the right of the people caring for these siblings to determine what they're comfortable with," he said.
But the Shirleys are concerned about what Brandon. "None of this would happen if the kids could just be a family," said Shirley.
That's also what Madison wants. "I want a real family," her letter pleads.
Harrell said the ultimate goal is to reunite all of them under one roof.
"Certainly all children deserve to have permanent homes, and they deserve to have permanent parents," said Harrell.
"In situations like these, you never want to send children into a home where more terrible things are going to happen because they have already been through a lifetime's worth of abuse and neglect."
But Brandon is already looking toward the future. He wants to join the military, get his college degree, and care for his brother and sister.
Far away from the home where he was locked down. With so much planned for his future, he said there are things he would like to forget.
"Yes, but I'm not going to say it," he said.
He's ready to write his own story.