Abused 32-Pound Kansas City 10-Year-Old Found Locked In Closet “Smelling Of Urine”

A Kansas City woman was charged on Saturday with abusing her 10-year-old daughter. The young girl was found in a closet that smelled like urine weighting just 32 pounds.

The child was discovered on Friday morning after a call was put in to a child abuse hotline, reports Fox News. As soon as authorities arrived, two women told the officers that the woman living there had left about 20 minutes earlier with two girls who seemed “clean and well fed.” Social services insisted that three children in fact lived in the home, but the women insisted that, “No, we have lived here for several years, and she only has two daughters that stay here, and we have never seen the other girl, but we heard she stays with the father or an aunt,” according to the report.

Officers entered the apartment, and found a portable crib pushed up against a closet door. The closet was also tied shut. The officers knocked and asked if anyone was inside. A child’s voice answered, “yes,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The girl told the police that he mother had taken out the other two girls for breakfast, but wouldn’t allow her to go because “she messes herself.”

The girl was brought to a Children’s Mercy Hospital where she was diagnosed with multiple skin injuries. Detectives interviewed the girl, who said that she gets put int he closet “a lot,” adding that she doesn’t eat every day and “does not want to go back home anymore.” She also said that she gets in trouble “because she keeps peeing on herself” and her mother will “punch her on her back real hard,” according to AP.

The mother was arrested Friday, and her other two children were placed in protective custody. She said that she doesn’t let the 10-year-old out of the house because she knows she’d “get in trouble if someone saw her.” The girl’s father, who has not been charged, says that he hasn’t seen his daughter in over a year, and that if he knew how she’d been treated, “he would have done something about it.”

The 29-year-old mother is likely to be charged with assault, child abuse, and endangerment in Jackson County Circuit Court. In order to protect the child, the mother’s name has not been released to the press. Bond has been requested to be set at $200,000.