Disabled Girl In Refrigerator: Dead Child Stored With Food For 6 Months

A disabled girl in a refrigerator was discovered when neighbors became suspicious because no one had seen the child for months. Residents at the Happy Home apartment complex in Texas were concerned for the safety and welfare of the child. So one of them surreptitiously entered the apartment where the girl lived through an unlocked entrance, according to a USA Today report.

Upon searching the refrigerator, the unidentified neighbor reportedly spotted the disabled girl wrapped in blankets and hidden in the crisper drawer. She was dead.

The New York Daily News shared a different story of how the body of the disabled girl was found in the refrigerator, reporting that another one of Keyes’s children located the corpse while searching for a cheese stick. However, the Houston Chronicle reported that police discovered the remains while performing a welfare check.

The mother of the disabled girl found in the refrigerator is 35-year-old Amber Keyes. She has been arrested and charged with injury to a child following the disturbing and gruesome discovery. Police alleged that the woman “intentionally and knowingly by omission [caused] serious bodily injury to Ayahna by failing to seek medical care for the child,” according to a USA Today report.

Although a concerned neighbor found the body of the disabled girl in the refrigerator on June 10, 2014, Keyes was not arrested and charged until Tuesday of this week. The little girl had been dead since January 29, 2014, but that didn’t stop her mother from continuing to use the same refrigerator for food storage.

Little 9-year-old Ayahna Comb weighed just 14 pounds at the time of her death from malnutrition and dehydration. Her death has been ruled a homicide. Keyes said she stored the lifeless body of the disabled girl in the refrigerator because she panicked. During her short life, Comb suffered from cerebral palsy, needed to be bottle fed, and couldn’t walk. After her death, her mother continued to receive the child’s Social Security benefits, reported the New York Daily News.

As previously reported by the Inquisitr, a malnourished Indiana teen was recently discovered living in a room with a padlocked door. The weak and emaciated girl had only a mattress, a bucket, blankets, a space heater, and a bowl of oatmeal in the room, which was filled with feces and had blood on the floor. She was transported to a local hospital, but her condition was so poor that she had to be airlifted to another facility for treatment.

The story of the disabled girl stored in a refrigerator is particularly disturbing since her mother allegedly lost custody of another child more than 10 years earlier. Back in 2009, CPS authorities reportedly investigated Keyes for child abuse. An 18-month-old child was removed from her home and put into foster care.

[Image via Houston County Sheriff’s Office]