KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — If telling his story helps one person get out of an abusive relationship, Justin McIntosh will be happy.
If even one family member spots the signs that a loved one is being victimized, the 24-year-old will consider his point made.
If even one friend or acquaintance speaks up because they think a person is being harmed, he'll be glad he stepped into the spotlight.
The 24-year-old Loudon County man doesn't want anyone else to go through what he and his older brother suffered as kids at the hands of Jessica Cox.
Ten years ago this spring, Justin and Austin McIntosh fled on foot in the middle of the night, walking three miles while handcuffed, from the Farragut home where they'd suffered physical and mental torment at the hands of Cox, their stepmother.
A sympathetic custodian at Farragut High School saw the skinny, dirty boys, called for help and they at last were set free.
Cox and the boys' father Michael McIntosh ended up going to prison in 2017 for what they did. They're still there today.
Now after years of therapy and the attentive love of his paternal grandparents, McIntosh wants to tell his story to spare others what happened to him. His older brother lives out of state and declined to comment for this story.
What follows comes from McIntosh and court records and testimony from the Knox County Criminal Court prosecutions of Cox, now 46, and Michael McIntosh, now 47.
"She would just beat us," Justin McIntosh said. "It was just horrible."
'I JUST WANT YOU TO DIE'
Surely all parents get angry with their kids at some point, some even to the point of spanking or employing other means of corporal discipline.
Surely all children act up, mouth off, disobey, get in trouble and for one reason or another deserve terms of tough love.
But what child deserves the kind of punishment Jessica Cox inflicted?
At various times before their escape in May 2013, she made the McIntosh boys stand or sit for long periods while cuffed to a stove or cabinet. She limited their food, sometimes for days, made Austin sit in an ice bath, made Austin suffer the pain of kneeling on piles of uncooked rice, cursed them, sometimes hit them, humiliated them.
She didn't start out being so abusive. For all practical purposes, Cox had acted as their mother for years. Their natural mother died.
Originally from Indiana, the family moved to Knox County in the mid 2000s.
As the boys advanced from elementary school age to their teens and as the family's fortunes slipped, Cox appeared to turn harsher with them, Justin McIntosh recalled.
They moved into a mobile home park off Canton Hollow Road, according to court records. It was there that Cox became increasingly abusive, he said.
Austin, the older brother at age 16, appeared to get much of the cruelest treatment. But Justin, two years younger, suffered under her as well.
At Cox's trial for aggravated child abuse in 2017, Michael McIntosh took the stand and backed up his sons' tales of maltreatment. Often, he admitted, he simply went along with it.
He told jurors the worst of it started in January 2013, following an incident involving Austin and another boy while on a family trip to Wilderness of the Smokies in Sevier County. She pulled Austin from Farragut High School and made him stay at home.
Over the course of the ensuing months, the father testified, he saw or learned of his wife's escalating abuse.
She'd cuff the older boy to the kitchen cabinets and make him stay that way all night, he said. Sometimes she cuffed Justin, he said.
One day while he was cuffed in the kitchen, she yelled at him, "I just want you to die," Michael McIntosh said.
Then she stomped on his bare foot.
Once when she was mad at Austin, she directed her husband to put a handful of rice on the floor and make his son kneel on it, according to testimony. Justin had handcuffed his brother on his stepmother's orders.
Austin had to kneel that way for 45 minutes to an hour.
Another time Michael McIntosh came home to find his sons scrubbing the mobile home floors during warm weather while wearing sweat suits. Cox told him she was making the boys do it so it would be hotter and more uncomfortable and they'd remember in the future to do a better job of cleaning the house.
Cox once held the older boy's head under water in the bathtub. She'd made Justin cuff his brother with his hands behind his back and then marched the older teen to the tub, shoved him in so that he was on his back in the water..."and she pulled his feet up to where his head went underwater. And then she let him back and then did it again, and he was, you know, of course, flailing and everything," a transcript of the father's testimony shows.
Michael McIntosh testified he loved his wife more than anything and couldn't stand the thought of losing her. Other witnesses testified he let her do anything she wanted; she ruled the house and he simply complied.
Cox took the stand in her own defense.
The boys caused and needed "some kind of psychological or some kind of help, because they were doing things that weren't ... normal," she testified. "And they were staying in trouble, doing the stealing, the lying, defecating in the vents."
She was it was her husband, not her, who meted out harsh treatment on the boys. He's the one, she said, who beat them, kicked them and hit them with a belt.
He was the abuser, she said, not her. She had no idea, she testified, that they'd gotten to be in such bad physical shape until she saw photos of them taken at East Tennessee Children's Hospital after their escape.
That, Justin McIntosh says today, was all a lie.
BREAKING POINT
The boys decided they'd had enough early the morning of May 28, 2013.
Cox and Michael McIntosh had been out the night of May 27. Before they'd left, they'd made sure Austin was cuffed to a cabinet.
He wasn't supposed to eat until they let him, and he wasn't supposed to be let free for any reason. But when they returned to the mobile home park that night, they learned that Austin had been uncuffed in their absence.
In fact, they discovered him sitting on the floor merely pretending to be handcuffed, with his hands tucked behind him.
Cox became infuriated, Justin McIntosh recalled. She screamed at both boys that they were bad children "who should be gotten rid of," according to court testimony. She ordered the brothers to be cuffed together, standing up.
Neither was allowed to eat that night. Cox hit the older teen on his feet with a rolling pin. One of his feet already was swollen from prior beatings.
Before turning in for the night, Michael McIntosh repositioned the boys so that they were sitting down, facing away from each other, with the cuff chain looped around the wooden "Tupperware" cabinet partition so that they could not move. Austin's cuff gripped his right hand; Justin's was on his left
When the trailer finally fell quiet and everyone appeared asleep, the boys whispered to each other that this was it -- they had to get out, Justin McIntosh told WBIR.
He squeezed through the lower cabinet as softly as he could and joined his brother on the other side.
"(Austin) was like, We gotta go, we gotta go!" Justin McIntosh recalled. "We gotta get out of here. Right away."
They paused to see if anyone was stirring, then made their way to the front bedroom. Silently moving furniture to the side, they lifted a window that was about a foot off the ground and stepped into the May night.
Wearing flip flops and still cuffed, they slowly walked in the night through the mobile home park and then up the road three miles toward Kingston Pike. Austin had an infected sore about the size of a dollar coin on one foot.
They stopped first at the Kroger across Farragut High School on Kingston Pike, hoping someone would let them use a phone.
When that didn't work, they tried a nearby Krispy Kreme. It was closed. Finally, they walked up to the drive-through window of a McDonald's, where someone let them use a cell phone. It was about 5:30 a.m. They left a message for their paternal grandparents.
After shoplifting some food back at the Kroger, Austin said they should walk to the high school because they might run into a teacher he knew who could help them. They found no teacher, but a custodian named Richard Huff spotted them near the school's main entrance, according to court testimony.
A shocked Huff called 911.
"I'm here at Farragut High School. I've got two little boys here," he said in the recording. "They're handcuffed together. Their parents have handcuffed them together."
Both boys were deeply afraid they'd have to go back to Cox.
"I remember Austin saying, Please don't take us back. Please don't take us back," the younger McIntosh said. "I remember one of the detectives that had literally just pulled up said, Buddy, don't you worry. There's about 20 sheriffs there with guns drawn. You're not going back there."
COMFORTS OF HOME
Today, Justin McIntosh enjoys helping people create appealing, attractive spaces in their own homes. After what he's been through, it makes sense that he's drawn to the real comforts of home.
"I love anything and everything with a home," he told WBIR. "I love making your home as beautiful as you can make it."
He lives with his paternal grandparents in Loudon County -- the people he calls his "grandbabies," "the most precious people in my entire life."
He spent five years in therapy. He approached WBIR because he wanted other people to know what he'd been through and to show them there's hope on the other side of abuse.
A jury convicted Cox in 2017 of 23 counts of aggravated child abuse and one count of reckless endangerment. She's serving a 24-year prison sentence at a state institution in Nashville.
Michael McIntosh pleaded guilty to 16 counts of aggravated child abuse and one count of child abuse. He's serving a 16-year term at the Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, Tenn.
Justin McIntosh said he goes to see his father a couple times a year.
"He has apologized probably 150 times," he said. "Every single time I talk to him the first thing that comes out of his mouth is I'm so sorry. I should have done better."
McIntosh said he hasn't had a chance to sit down and address what happened with Cox. But he'd like to. He wants closure; he'd like answers from her that he knows she probably won't give him.
Austin McIntosh has moved out of state and works as a flight mechanic with hopes of becoming a pilot, according to his brother.
Some days -- days in May -- can be tough for Justin. But he focuses on moving forward, and he focuses on things that make him happy, like bright colors.
His grandparents planted bright flowers outside his bedroom that he can look at when he needs cheering up.
He knows there's always hope.
He would like anyone who sees this story to know "they can get through this in life, and you don't always have to be stuck where you're at. Life does go forward, and it can get better."
