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Westword tells the story of Jodi Jill, a thirty-year old woman now, who in the past has been kept by her parents for a decade in a storage unit in Loveland, Colorado. The story depicts the terrible living conditions in the shed, shared also by Jodi's parents and siblings. Although the family was not really poor, it stayed in the unit and avoided contact with other people. Children never attended school, and learned to read and write only after their parents split up and left the unit. The article describes Jodi's later extreme interest in books and reading, and efforts to help illiterate people. A major point in the story is that a lot of adults were supposedly aware of the children's situation, but failed to report it to the police.

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