Authorities said on Friday that a Brazilian woman and her two adult children had been released by police after being held captive by her husband for 17 years.
An anonymous tip alerted police to the case in a poor neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro's west.
"The two children, who are the children of the woman and the suspect, were tied up, soiled, and starved," said Rio's military police, who arrested the father.
According to local media, the woman and her children, ages 19 and 22, were taken to the hospital in a state of "serious dehydration and malnutrition."
The mother told authorities that she and her children would sometimes go three days without food and were regularly subjected to physical and psychological abuse.
Her husband, Luiz Antonio Santos Silva, with whom she had been married for 23 years, had told her that she would leave his home only "when you're dead," she claimed.
"When we saw the two children's condition, we thought they wouldn't have survived another week," one unnamed resident of the family's Guaratiba neighborhood said.
"I tried to talk to the mother in the ambulance, but she was so weak she couldn't make a sound."
According to neighbors, the suspect was given the nickname DJ because he would turn up the music to drown out his victims' screams.