Kidnapped teenager escapes after 29 days of rape and torture

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A farmer in rural Minnesota was stepping into his truck Tuesday when something caught his eye in the grassy fields behind his property. Hundreds of yards away, he spotted what he thought was a deer.

It was actually a teenage girl, walking toward him wearing no shoes or pants, he told WCCO. She was sopping wet. He immediately recognised her face.

"Oh my gosh, you got to be kidding me," the farmer said.

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"I've been kidnapped," the girl told him, she later recounted to television station WCCO.

Police said that for 29 days, the girl had been held captive in a mobile home by three men who restrained her with zip ties, threatened her with guns and repeatedly raped her. They treated her "like an animal," prosecutors said in charging documents, according to Fox 9, holding her against her will in a closet and trying to kill her on multiple occasions.

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"I was usually in a closet and I usually stayed quiet because I was scared they might hit me or do something," the girl later told Fox 9.

In two different instances, Baker allegedly attempted to drown the girl in a bathtub. On another occasion, the girl was forced to stand on a bucket with a rope around her neck, according to court documents cited by Fox 9. Holby then allegedly forced her off the bucket, making it impossible for her to breathe for a period of time, the girl told police.

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The teen waited with the farmer in his pickup truck until deputies arrived.

"I was getting her out of the pickup to put her in the deputy's car, and she says 'There's the car, there's the car'," the farmer told WCCO. She had spotted a vehicle belonging to one of the captors driving right past the home. The man, identified by police as Steven Powers, 20, of Mankato, was immediately stopped and arrested.

Soon after, officials arrested Thomas Barker, 32, and Joshua Holby, 31, both from Carlos, Minnesota. All three are charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment. Barker and Powers also face charges of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, and Barker faces an additional charge of second-degree assault.

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