A Gwinnett mother accused of starving her 15-year-old daughter and keeping her locked in room reeking of human waste faced various charges involving the child when they lived in Maryland.
Jade Marie Jacobs is now in the Gwinnett County jail charged with malicious child cruelty and false imprisonment after she dropped her daughter at Scottish Rite hospital just after midnight Aug. 1, telling the medical staff that she couldn't deal with the child. Police say the girl might be autistic.
Officers are still searching for the stepfather, William Anthony Brown, who is also charged in the case. The teenager is in Scottish Rite, 11 days after arriving there weighing 60 pounds, with cuts and bruises consistent with abuse and sores indicative of being immobilized for long periods of time.
“The doctors believe that the sores on her knees and buttocks were from being confined ,” said Cpl. Ed Ritter of Gwinnett Police. “We could say they purposely put her in tightly confined space.”
But in March of 2000, Jacobs was charged with assault by putting her then baby daughter into extremely hot bath water, according to records in Baltimore City Circuit Court. Whether the water scalded the girl was unclear but the facts prompted the police to make it a criminal complaint.
The case was eventually dismissed by the prosecutor, who has since died, but the records don’t make it clear whether it was part of a deal or because of lack of evidence. The records, however, indicate that Jacobs did not have custody of the girl for the next couple of years because the state of Maryland sued her in July 2002 for not paying child support.
Martin McGuire, the state attorney who headed up the child-support office at the time, said the child could have been placed with the other parent, a family member or in foster care.
The 15-year-old and her three younger sisters, who police say showed no sign of abuse, are in the custody of state Department of Family and Children Services, Ritter said.
Gwinnett investigators believe the girl was kept in a basement room either as punishment or because her parents wanted her isolated because of behavior associated with autism, Ritter said.
The room had a closet in which the girl might have been locked or she might have retreated to but it appeared she spent many hours there by the amount of urine and feces, Ritter said. The closet contained a urine soaked 2-by-2 square-foot mat, which investigators believed she used to cushion herself from the tile floor, Ritter said.
Attempts to reach Jacobs’ Georgia lawyer, Romero Pearson, were unsuccessful. Kenneth Ravenell, her attorney for the Maryland case, did not return a phone message.
Attempts to reach Jacobs’ and Brown’s family members were also unsuccessful.
Jacobs told the medical staff at Scottish Rite her daughter’s wounds were from fighting with a sister; and she said her daughter routinely refused to eat which blamed for the low weight.
The staff, however, soon determined the girl was ravenously hungry, Ritter said.
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