A pair of twin teenagers managed to escape a horror house when they broke free from handcuffs in their Tomball, Texas home and ran to a neighbor’s house.

The teenagers, who looked malnourished and were covered in bruises, triggered an Amber alert for their five other siblings when they escaped from their home.

Harris County Precinct 5 Constable spokesperson Jeff McShan said the case was set in motion when the twins, a boy, and a girl, aged 16, went to a neighbor’s house on Monday and asked the neighbor to call the police because they had just escaped captivity from their home, where their mother had handcuffed and locked them inside the house against their will.

The two teens said they had recently moved to the neighborhood and had not been outside the house, so they did not know their exact address.

McShan said that when authorities first encountered the twins, they knew that the teens were in distress, and they observed bruises on their wrists and deep marks caused by the tight handcuffs. He said that the two looked malnourished and bruised.

Authorities took the twins to a nearby hospital to be treated for their injuries and handed them over to Child Protective Services.

The police searched for the twin’s house for several hours before finally arriving at the right location. When they looked around, they discovered that the other five children, the twin’s mother, 40-year-old Zaikiya Duncan, and her boyfriend, 27-year-old Jova Terrell, had already left the house.

The police issued an Amber alert for the seven of them, and the twin’s mother, her boyfriend, and one child were found a few hours later in Baton Rouge at around 5 pm on Tuesday.

When questioned about the rest of the children, the couple told the police they had left four other children at the home of one of Duncan’s relatives.

The constable’s office said they found the four children safe at a relative’s home and that Duncan and her boyfriend were already in police custody and would be transported back to Harris County.

It is not the first time Duncan had been accused of being abusive to her children. According to Louisiana court records, previously she was charged with three counts of cruelty to minors in 2012 after one of her children, age five, was treated for burn wounds that showed Duncan had dipped the child in hot water. The records also show that the child regularly slept in the closet, which Duncan would barricade with floorboards to stop the child from escaping from the bedroom and going to the kitchen to steal food. Both Duncan and Terrell will be charged with injury to a child in the first degree in Harris County.