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A Kansas City woman was charged Saturday with abusing her 10-year-old daughter who weighed
just 32 pounds when she was found locked in a closet that reeked of urine. The 29-year-old
woman faces charges of assault and child abuse and endangerment in Jackson County Circuit
Court. The Associated Press is not naming the mother to protect the child’s identity. Prosecutors
are requesting that bond be set at $200,000. Officers freed the girl after responding Friday
morning to a call to a child abuse hotline. Neighbors told police that they didn’t know the mal-
nourished child taken from the public housing complex even lived there. When officers first
arrived, two women told the officers that the mother had left about 20 minutes earlier with
two girls, whom they described as “clean and well fed,” a Kansas City officer said in the pro-
bable cause statement. A social services worker said there should be three children at the home.
But the women insisted, “No, we have lived here for several years, and she only has two daugh-
ters that stay here, and we have never seen the other girl, but we heard she stays with the father
or an aunt,” the probable cause statement said. Officers ultimately made their way into the
apartment, where they found a portable crib pushed up against a bedroom closet, which was
tied closed. The officers asked if anyone was inside, and a child’s voice answered “yes,” the pro-
bable cause statement said. The girl told officers that her mother took her sisters out to break-
fast, but she didn’t go because “she messes herself.” The girl was transported to a Children’s
Mercy Hospital, where she was diagnosed with multiple skin injuries. Hospital staff said she
had gained just 6 pounds since she last was at the hospital six years earlier. The girl told de-
tectives who interviewed her at the hospital that her mother puts her in the closet “a lot,” that
she doesn’t get to eat every day and that she “does not want to go back home anymore.” The
girl also said she gets in trouble “because she keeps peeing on herself” and her mother will
“punch her on her back real hard,” according to the probable cause statement. The mother
was arrested later Friday and the two younger children were placed in protective custody.
The mother told police she doesn’t let the 10-year-old leave the house because she knows
the girl is malnourished and would “get in trouble if someone saw her.” The mother’s boy-
friend, who is not the girl’s father and hasn’t been charged, said he hadn’t seen the girl in
about a year. He said that when he asked about her, the mother told him she was with her
aunt or in her room because she was in trouble. He said he never knew the mother put the
girl in the closet or “he would have done something about it,” the probable cause statement
said. Mike Mansur, a spokesman for the Jackson County prosecutor’s office, said the mother
hasn’t said why she singled the girl out.
