Just before noon on a summer day four years ago, a Plant city, Florida, police car pulled up outside a rental house with shattered windows. Two officers went into the house—and one stumbled back out. Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.
Plant City detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation.
They found an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families parked outside. The driver’s door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. “Unbelievable,” she told Holste. “The worst I’ve ever seen.”
Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke,
dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.
While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .
The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.
At his feet, something stirred.
First he saw the girl’s eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn’t looking at him so much as through him.
She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her dark hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked—except for a swollen diaper.
When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. “It felt like I was picking up a baby,” Holste said. The girl didn’t struggle. Holste asked, “What’s your name, honey?” The girl didn’t seem to hear.
He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. “But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches.”
Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen? He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss, he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.
“Radio ahead to Tampa General,” Holste told his partner. “If this child doesn’t get to a hospital, she’s not going to make it.”
Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost seven years old. She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn’t chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.
Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.
Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn’t know how to hold a doll, didn’t understand peekaboo. “Due to the severe neglect,” a doctor would write, “the child will be disabled for the rest of her life.”
Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. “Like an infant,” one doctor wrote.
She wouldn’t make eye contact. She didn’t react to heat or cold—or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn’t talk, didn’t know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.
Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing, and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn’t deaf, wasn’t autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.
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