A San Diego County couple will spend the next 25 years in state prison after pleading guilty to years of torture against a 7-year-old girl left in their care.
Devin Hughes, 39, and his girlfriend Kayla Reynolds, 32, received the sentence after admitting to 15 felony counts in March, including torture, child abuse, corporal injury, mayhem, and assault likely to cause great bodily injury. The pair had been holding the child captive in a rural mobile home in Boulevard, a tiny unincorporated community in southeastern San Diego County.
The victim was Hughes’s own biological niece, one of four children living in the cramped residence during the summer of 2025. While the other three children appeared unharmed, prosecutors said the girl was singled out for systematic cruelty that left her body mapped with injuries.
“The level of abuse inflicted on this 7-year-old child is abhorrent and heartbreaking,” San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan said in a statement.
The nightmare ended only when the child broke free in July 2025 and sprinted to a neighbor’s door with a desperate plea. She asked whether she could come live with them because her uncle and his girlfriend were hurting her. The neighbor immediately called law enforcement.
San Diego County sheriff’s deputies who responded found the girl’s small frame covered in bruises, scars, burn marks, and a fresh black eye. She told officers that Hughes had bound her hands behind her back with a zip tie, then deliberately tripped her, causing the facial injury.
Medical personnel at Rady Children’s Hospital documented the full scope of the damage. During her hospitalization, the child gained five pounds, suggesting severe deprivation before her rescue. She was later placed with another family member.
“When police conducted a search of the residence, they found horrendous living conditions and several items of evidence that corroborated the horrible abuse suffered by the victim including zip ties, cable locks, and vape pens,” prosecutors said.
The abuse catalogued by the district attorney’s office spanned multiple forms of physical and psychological torture. The couple forced the girl to hold her urine until she lost control, then compelled her to clean the mess with her tongue. They wielded pocketknives to hack at her hair, pressed hot vape pens against her skin, withheld food, and made her swallow dirty toilet water. At night she slept on the floor, and when her captors wanted to restrain her they chained her to a treadmill using a cable lock.
Hughes and Reynolds both entered guilty pleas, sparing the child from testifying at trial. The 25-year prison term brings a measure of finality to a case that shocked even veteran child-abuse investigators in the region.
The girl has since been placed with a family member and continues receiving care following her hospitalization.