Jacole Prince’s child abuse trial starts with recounting of LP’s rescue from closet

More than three years after rescuing an emaciated 10-year-old girl from her mother’s locked closet, Kansas City police officers and other witnesses recalled the horror to a Jackson County jury on Monday.

The girl, known in public only as LP, weighed just 32 pounds when she was found sitting amid her own waste in June 2012.

Her mother, Jacole Prince, 32, is accused of locking LP in the closet and rarely feeding her. So hidden was LP that neighbors did not know she lived with her family in their Kansas City apartment.

Prince faces charges of child endangerment, first-degree assault and child abuse.

Her public defender, Caitlin Stephenson, told jurors Monday that Prince suffered from a “mental disease,” that a mental evaluation scheduled in 2006 never was completed, and that representatives from the Children’s Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services failed to follow up.

Assistant Jackson County Prosecutor Trisha Lacey walked jurors through how LP was found in the closet and what the prosecution alleges led Prince to treat her daughter that way.

Kansas City police officers searching Prince’s apartment noticed a playpen had been pushed against a double closet door. The doorknobs had been tied shut with shoelaces. One of the officers knocked on the door.

“The officer, half-jokingly, said, ‘Anybody in there?’ ” Lacey said. “Imagine his shock when a small voice said ‘I am.’ ”

Lacey said that inside the closet, officers saw a young girl, “a 32-pound child who was 10 years old.”

Lacey showed jurors a photo of LP and photos of food in the apartment’s refrigerator and pantry.

“There was plenty of food in the house,” Lacey said. “There was food in the refrigerator, there was food in the cabinet.”

Prince had grown upset with LP, the eldest of her three daughters, because LP would not obey her, Lacey said.

“That made the defendant angry,” Lacey said.

And although Prince eventually realized that LP needed medical attention, she didn’t take her daughter to a hospital, fearing that authorities would take LP and her two other daughters.

“She did not want anybody to see how horribly she had treated her child,” Lacey said.

After eight days in a hospital, LP went home with a foster family and began to feel better, Lacey said. But, she added, “the damage to her body had been more severe than anybody knew.”

Ultimately LP underwent a heart transplant, Lacey said.

“The defendant’s actions literally broke her daughter’s heart,” Lacey said.

Stephenson offered a different view of events.

Prince began operating under a “delusion” that LP was eating too much and was soiling her clothes intentionally, Stephenson said. Prince then began to believe that she needed to withhold food from LP, thinking it would help control her bowel movements.

“As a result of this delusion, Jacole was unable to recognize that she was harming her daughter,” Stephenson said.

It can’t be known exactly why LP developed her heart condition, Stephenson said. A pediatric cardiologist did not begin to examine LP’s case until about two months after LP was discovered in the closet.

Dispatched that day to check the welfare of a child, Officer Kenny Miller found only confusion among apartment complex residents when he asked about a third child living in Prince’s apartment.

An apartment maintenance worker opened the apartment door for Miller and a child welfare worker. Finding no one in first-floor rooms, they headed for the stairs.

“At the top of the stairs you could start to smell the stench,” Miller said.

When they opened the closet, “it stunk bad,” he said. He saw a trash bag, some chicken bones, dirty clothes — and a girl.

The child welfare worker “scooped her up and ran out the door,” Miller said. “I called the ambulance.”

At the Children’s Mercy Hospital emergency room, LP’s heart rate was “abnormally low,” her body temperature was 96.8 instead of 98.6, and her blood pressure was on the “high side,” testified Amy Terroros, a pediatric nurse practitioner.

LP had very poor muscle tone, needed help to walk to the bathroom, and was underweight, Terroros said. “A child of her age should have weighed close to 60” pounds, she said.

LP told hospital social worker Shellie Brandon that her back hurt “because my mommy punches me in the back,” Brandon testified.

When Brandon asked LP about when that would happen, LP told her, “When I don’t listen.”

Heather Dietrich, a former Kansas City police crime scene technician, described how she and a colleague documented the contents and condition of the closet. “The smell of urine was pretty bad,” said Dietrich, adding that thepile of assorted clothing items, bedding and trash grew more saturated as she dug deeper. She also encountered maggots, she said.

The trial comes nearly two years after prosecutors thought they had settled the case, with Prince pleading guilty to all three counts facing her in January 2014.

A judge withdrew the guilty pleas the next month after Prince wrote the court a postcard and The Star a 42-page letter, saying in both that she hadn’t wanted to plead guilty but had felt pressured to do so.

Prince had submitted Alford pleas on the assault and abuse charges, meaning that she conceded that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her. She could have faced life in prison just for the assault charge, but prosecutors had agreed to limit prison time to 20 years. She had been scheduled to be sentenced in April 2014.

The Jackson County judge said that he considered the postcard from Prince a “request to withdraw” her guilty pleas. That action came one day after The Star published a story about the letter Prince sent the newspaper.

Prince denied striking her daughter, starving her or intentionally hurting her. She also said she had tried to feed LP, but the girl couldn’t eat much.

Officials also removed Prince’s two other daughters from her care.

Prince wrote The Star that she loved her girls and missed them every day.

“I never meant for any of this to happen,” she wrote.

Details of LP’s plight emerge as Missouri releases records on girl locked in closet

Starved girl known as LP had to have a heart transplant

Jacole Prince pleads guilty to abusing daughter locked in closet

LP’s mother says in letter that she didn’t intend to plead guilty

This story was originally published November 16, 2015 at 9:53 AM with the headline "Jacole Prince’s child abuse trial starts with recounting of LP’s rescue from closet."