The case of an autistic 15-year-old starved to 66 pounds and kept in a basement closet is now with a Gwinnett County jury.
Lawyers made their closing arguments in the case of Jade Jacobs and William Brown on Wednesday after Jacobs and Brown, the child’s mother and stepfather, testified in their own defense. They face child cruelty and false imprisonment charges for allegedly abusing the girl who was taken into state custody in August 2014.
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In testimony during the weeklong trial, Jacobs detailed her struggles to get help for her daughter’s severe developmental disabilities after moving to Lawrenceville from Baltimore.
The AJC is not naming the girl, now 17 and living with a foster family in Middle Georgia, because she is a minor and an alleged victim of abuse.
Jacobs’ attorney Lawrence Lewis painted her as a mother who was trying her best, but over her head without help from doctors, state agencies or her husband. Jacobs wasn’t approved for assistance from one agency until November 2014, when she had already been in jail for three months.
“At a certain point you break,” Lewis said. “At a certain point, everybody breaks.”
Brown, the girl’s stepfather and a long-haul trucker, said he was only home a few days a month and wasn’t actively involved in the parenting or discipline of the girl. A taped phone call with a Gwinnett County detective showed Brown reacting with apparent surprise when he was asked if he knew that the girl was being kept in a closet.
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Prosecutor Bobby Wolf detailed the evidence in his closing statement, noting that the girl was medically diagnosed with starvation and suffered refeeding syndrome — a dangerous change in electrolytes after a starving person begins to eat too quickly — when she was fed at the hospital. The child also had bedsores on her knees, hips and ankles that led a child abuse pediatrician to believe the girl had been kept in a cage.
The child had also lost 19 pounds between the last day of school in May and Aug. 1, 2014, when she was admitted to the hospital, Wolf said.
“This is an unimaginable and horrifying crime inflicted on the most innocent of victims,” Wolf said. “They were a mother and a stepfather, but they were not parents.”
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