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The woman accused of locking her nephew naked in a bathroom for years and later charged with raping him is headed to trial May 18, with court records showing both criminal cases against her are moving on the same schedule toward a jury trial in Judge Andrew Bailey’s courtroom.
Jaclyn Barnett, 43, faces more than 150 criminal counts spread across two cases. A pretrial hearing for both cases is set for April 13 at 9:30 a.m. The scheduling orders, filed March 2, were signed by Circuit Judge Andrew S. Bailey. Speedy trial has been tolled until Barnett’s next court appearance.
Co-defendant Daniel Wright, 41, faces charges in the original case as well. Separate scheduling documents filed the same day list him on an identical trial timeline.
The two have been held in the Baxter County Detention Center on $1 million bond each since November 2025, when rape charges were added to an already staggering list of allegations stemming from years of abuse against a child in their care.
Barnett faces 112 counts of first-degree false imprisonment, one count of kidnapping, one count of endangering the welfare of a minor and one count of permitting abuse of a minor in the original case. The rape charges filed against her last year add 10 counts of rape of a person under 14 years old and unable to consent, 10 counts of sexual indecency with a child, 10 counts of second-degree sexual assault and 10 counts of first-degree false imprisonment with risk of injury.
Wright faces the same 113 original counts as Barnett, along with additional charges of first-degree endangering the welfare of a minor and first-degree false imprisonment with risk of injury.
The case began Nov. 2, 2024, when Mountain Home police responded to an apartment on reports of cries for help. Officers were led by downstairs neighbors to the master bedroom of the upstairs unit, where they could hear a teenage boy calling out from behind a locked door. A red ratchet strap had been threaded from the door of the master bathroom to the bedpost, securing it shut from the outside.
When the strap was released, officers found a naked 15-year-old boy. He told them he had been locked inside since the previous night. There were no clothes in the bathroom. The boy told officers he had once stuffed his clothing into the bathroom vent to block cold air, and that being left without clothes appeared to be his punishment for it.
He said he had no bedroom of his own. He slept on a pallet on the bathroom floor every night. The only time he was let out, he told officers, was to go to school. School was also the only place he was allowed to eat.
School attendance records confirmed what the boy described. Since January 2024, when Barnett and Wright moved the family into the Mountain Home apartment, the child had been present in school just 112 days.
When officers interviewed the two younger children in the apartment, ages 10 and 11, they initially acted as though they did not know anyone was in the bathroom. When asked to demonstrate how the ratchet strap worked, they could not do it.
Barnett and Wright were at work when officers arrived. Both told police they had no idea the boy was locked in the bathroom and suggested the other children must have been playing. Investigators noted the explanation was contradicted by the children’s own inability to operate the strap.
The couple also told police the strap was used to keep all the children out of the bathroom because of a leaky faucet that had been reported to apartment management multiple times. Apartment managers told investigators their only contact from the family had been in July, about a loose toilet.
The boy referred to Barnett as his mother and Wright as his stepfather. Court records tell a different story. Barnett is the boy’s paternal aunt and his legal guardian. Guardianship documents show Barnett filed for legal custody of the child, and annual guardianship reports show the child received $733 per month in Social Security benefits while in her care.
As the investigation deepened, a disturbing pattern emerged. Since 2013, when the child would have been approximately 4 years old, 29 reports had been made to the Arkansas Department of Human Services child abuse hotline about his welfare. The complaints came from mandated reporters — people required by law to report suspected abuse, including teachers, school resource officers, coaches, social workers and health care professionals — as well as from anonymous callers. The reports described maltreatment, inadequate supervision, failure to provide food, failure to provide essential needs, extreme or repeated cruelty and failure to protect.
Every single one of those 29 reports was closed as unsubstantiated.
Baxter County Prosecutor David Ethredge, whose office is prosecuting both cases against Barnett and Wright, testified about the abuse in detail during an October 2025 hearing before the joint House and Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committees in Little Rock.
“He was being malnourished, was not being fed,” Ethredge told lawmakers. “He was not being allowed to go to school at times. He was being restrained within the room that we have charged them with for substantial periods of time.”
“The best we can tell, the only place of relief this child had would have been when he went to school,” Ethredge said. “It was away from his home situation.”
Ethredge also revealed that the Mountain Home case was not his first encounter with failures by DHS. In 2020, he said, his office prosecuted two separate juvenile homicide cases in the same week. Both young offenders had prior DHS contact that had not resulted in any intervention.
During the October hearing, Division of Children and Family Services Director Tiffany Wright told lawmakers that not a single DHS employee had been disciplined for missing the 29 reports. She also confirmed the agency had not searched its database for other children with similar patterns of repeated, unsubstantiated complaints.
“There has not been disciplinary action for staff,” she told the committee.
The acknowledgment of systemic failure did not end there. Before the legislative hearing, Ethredge had met privately with then-DHS Director Kristi Putnam and the agency’s chief attorney. Putnam told Ethredge that DHS had not met its responsibilities to the child and that the ball had been “badly dropped.” DHS initially committed to releasing a public report on the internal investigation.
That promise was then reversed. In a letter to Ethredge, DHS said the initial commitment to release the report was inappropriate and represented a departure from how child maltreatment cases are typically handled. The agency said it had been a mistake to suggest that a non-standard report including specifics about the case could be publicly released. DHS said any shortcomings identified internally would be handled within the agency and cited confidentiality statutes to block the release. Putnam has since left the agency. A DHS spokesman said at the time that the change in leadership would not delay the report’s completion or its delivery to Ethredge. No public report has been released.
In the wake of the case, DHS identified 341 other cases statewide with a similar profile — multiple hotline reports filed over time with no action taken to remove the child from the home. No public report on the outcome of that review has been released either.
The joint legislative committee voted in October to refer the matter to the Child Maltreatment Investigations Oversight Committee, Arkansas’s only closed-door legislative body, for further investigation. Committee Chairman Sen. Scott Flippo of Bull Shoals announced a second public hearing would take place before the end of 2025. It never happened.
State Rep. Stetson Painter told the Mountain Home Observer earlier this year that a second hearing is expected later in 2026, after the legislature completes its work on the state budget.
As of this report, no DHS employee has been publicly disciplined in connection with the agency’s failure to act on 29 abuse reports spanning more than a decade.
With the trial now approaching, a pretrial fight has broken out over how the boy will testify. Prosecutors filed a motion asking the court to allow him to testify out of Barnett’s direct line of sight. The motion notes that the layout of the Baxter County Courtroom puts witnesses within roughly 8 feet of and directly facing the defendant, and that the child is terrified of Barnett. The state described the boy as socially awkward and developmentally delayed, attributing those conditions directly to what the defendants did to him over the past decade. Prosecutors noted the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld a similar arrangement in a 2000 rape trial, and suggested the victim and the court reporter exchange seats for the duration of the boy’s testimony.
Defense attorney James Hensley Jr. of the Hensley Law Firm in Conway responded with a filing that accused Ethredge of repeatedly violating Arkansas Rules of Professional Conduct, specifically Rule 3.8, which governs the special responsibilities of prosecutors. Hensley argued in the filing that Ethredge is attempting to gain a superior position in the case and that his conduct constitutes an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.
Hensley argued that allowing the child to testify in a different location would bolster the witness’s position while limiting Barnett’s constitutional rights under the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, which guarantees a defendant the right to physically face those who testify against them. He said the state’s claim that the boy is developmentally delayed was unsupported by any physician’s testimony or medical history and characterized the motion as self-serving.
Hensley also argued that the prosecution’s framing of the case was itself improper, writing in court documents that according to DHS, the public school system, law enforcement and medical providers, there had been no finding of any violation of law by the defendants. He said the prosecutor’s motion directly impugned the character of his client without provocation.
Hensley further objected to the prosecution’s use of the word “victim” to describe the child throughout court filings, calling the designation offensive and arguing it reflected an attitude of entitlement on the part of the prosecutor, who he noted is bound by law to presume Barnett innocent until proven otherwise.
In a separate filing responding to a defense motion over sentencing evidence, Deputy Prosecutor Christopher Carter made clear that while the state intends to seek a harsh sentence, this is not a death penalty case and life without parole is not an option. Carter wrote that at sentencing, if Barnett is convicted, the state plans to call the boy, DHS workers and his foster parents to testify about the impact the abuse has had on him.
A court order signed by Bailey on March 8 requires the prosecution to release records from the Child Abuse and Child Death unit to the defense under a protective order. The court found those records may contain exculpatory evidence. The records are confidential under Arkansas law, may only be shared with Barnett, her attorney and his staff, and must be kept under seal if entered as evidence at any hearing.
The boy is reported to be doing well in a foster home, with additional support from school district officials.
