You may be right about the meth-head analysis. I think druggies might be less of a reach though than sadism.
Sorry to post so late, I missed this story when it first came out. The parents weren’t meth-heads. They lived very wealthy lives. They owned a small business, a spa place. They took vacations.
What they did was treat this one child horribly. He is lucky to have gone to the store for food.
He and the other children will need a lot of counseling. The fact that the older kids never told anyone about their brother’s abuse shows that they were all being brainwashed. God help them all.