Kansas City, Jacole Prince, 29, mother accused of keeping her 10-year-old daughter locked in a closet, not letting her come out to eat, sleep or even go to the bathroom.
The girl weighed just 32 pounds, and hospital records indicated that she has only gained 6 pounds since she was 4 or 5 years old, The girl also suffers from “multiple healing skin injuries and failure to thrive,” the statement said.
The girl was discovered in the apartment in the 1300 block of Highland Avenue. Police said she was covered in urine and feces and appeared to have been there for quite some time.
When a division worker told two women outside the apartment that three children lived in the apartment, the neighbors said they had never seen the third child even though they’d lived there for “several years.”
“We never knew of her the whole three years we’ve been down here,” Kimberly Kelley, another neighbor, told KMBC-TV. “She told us she only had two kids.”
The girl was found standing in the closet, according to the statement. She told officers “the closet was her room,” and she couldn’t go to breakfast with her mother and sisters because she “messes herself.” She also sleeps there, she said.
At the hospital, the child told detectives she had not been let out of the closet for two days, and she does not eat every day. She said her mother gets mad and “punches her on the back” because she “keeps peeing on herself.”
That night, police arrested the girl’s mother and her boyfriend. The mother allegedly admitted to locking her child up in part because she knows she would get in trouble if anyone saw how malnourished the girl had become, according to the statement.