Inside a windowless room at a Gwinnett County home that had burned to cinders, a 10-year-old girl died of smoke inhalation.
When that fire started four years ago, Zoe McCue was asleep in a locked bathroom, where a plywood slab placed over the tub served as her makeshift bed, officials said. The investigation that followed the blaze revealed she and her four siblings had suffered years of abuse at the hands of their parents.
Last week, her father was sentenced to life in prison in her death and the abuse of her siblings. Her mother was sentenced to 90 years.
“The treatment of these children was horrible,” Gwinnett district attorney Patsy Austin-Gatson said in a news release issued after Thursday’s sentencing. “This child’s death was unconscionable and preventable, and she and her siblings deserved better than they received from their parents.”
William Linn McCue, 51, was found guilty of felony murder, two counts of rape, three counts of aggravated child molestation and two counts of incest. He was ordered to serve four life sentences plus 120 years.
His wife, 42-year-old Carina McCue, testified during his trial. She pleaded guilty in early May to three counts of first-degree cruelty to children, aggravated assault and false imprisonment and learned of her long punishment on the same day as her husband.
They have both been at the Gwinnett jail since their arrest in June 2022.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reached out to Carina McCue’s attorneys for comment. Attempts to contact William McCue’s lawyer have been unsuccessful.
On Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022, when the fire started, Carina McCue was not able to reach Zoe but managed to rescue her then 12- and 8-year-old sons, authorities said. William McCue and the family’s oldest daughter were not home at the time.
When first responders arrived at the Beaver Road home, the family’s oldest son, then 15, was considered missing. Officials said he was eventually located at a church.
During William McCue’s trial, the jury learned the oldest son started the fire to escape the abuse he and his siblings had endured, said district attorney office spokesperson Marcus Garner. Immediately after Zoe’s death, the son faced charges of murder, but officials confirmed those were dropped.
“In William McCue’s trial, the testimony was that it was an ‘outcry,’ and since it was determined to be an ‘outcry for help’ the murder charges were not pursued,” Garner said.
Testimony and evidence presented in court during the father’s trial revealed the children were beaten, forced to wear shock collars, made to stand on cinder blocks for hours or days, and used buckets instead of toilets, the DA’s office said.
The McCue’s oldest daughter, who was 17 at the time of the fire, also told officials that William McCue had been abusing her and her sisters since they were young girls, Garner said.
Zoe’s siblings, with the exception of the oldest boy who was facing charges, moved into protective custody soon after the fire. Garner said all the children have “flourished” once they were no longer living with their parents.
In 2022, the AJC reported the family had been investigated by the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services on two separate occasions before the fire put the household under even more scrutiny.
The first took place in 2015, when DFCS officials opened an investigation after a teacher at a Gwinnett school reported a suspicious mark on the face of one of the children. The extensive investigation, which included a walk-through of the home that later burned down, was closed and no charges were ever filed.
The second investigation took place in 2019 and led to William McCue’s arrest in Tennessee. Someone called the Tennessee child abuse hotline to report McCue, who was seen getting out of a truck with four of his children and walking into the woods. Police searched for hours for McCue and the children and eventually found them walking down a road, at which point they took him into custody. Few details were included about the incident in DFCS reports obtained by the AJC, but the documents said Carina McCue drove from Gwinnett to Tennessee to pick up the children.
Charges against the parents after the 2022 fire were not immediate. Gwinnett police previously said that William and Carina McCue had been on the run since early May when officials first obtained warrants. They were taken into custody on the Appalachian Trail near Helen by late June of that year, police said.
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