Slept in Bathtub, Didn’t Attend School : Abducted Boy Found in Father’s Shack

HUBBARDTON, Vt. — A 9-year-old snatched by his father seven years ago lived with him in a filthy shack on a dead-end road with a bathtub for a bed and a bucket for a toilet before officers found him in a raid, authorities said today.

Mosie McCarty had been the object of a nationwide search since he was abducted in California, but officers didn’t know the boy lived in the shack before they converged on it July 27 to arrest his father on charges of using false names on motor vehicle records.

“We thought we were on to one of the country’s most wanted criminals,” said Rutland County Sheriff Lee Jones. “Who else would change his name four, five times to hide a child? One change would have done it.”

Jones said the boy, who lived in the one-room wood and cement shack for three years, did not know his middle or last names, his date of birth or his mother’s name. His father, John McCarty, did not send him to school.

The nearest neighbor in this town of 490 residents was half a mile away.

McCarty, 39, has pleaded innocent to custodial interference for allegedly abducting the boy. The state has put the boy in a foster home.

The boy’s mother, Pat Gilmartin of Sussex Borough, N.J., was awarded custody of Mosie by a court in Newton, N.J., seven years ago. She declined comment after a closed-door custody hearing Tuesday.

McCarty said he wants his son back.

“I love my son,” he said. “The police make me out to look like Charles Manson or something, but I love the kid and I’ve done everything I could for the kid.”

McCarty, who said he has two years of college, said he taught his son at home. On a bookshelf in the shack were a set of encyclopedias and books on chemistry, the Civil War and electronics.