Please...even a 10 year old knows you have to have food to live. Stop making excuses for them. Their mother starved to death and they watched.
Did you read this part in the article?
Dougherty kept his wife locked in the bedroom after she suffered a brain aneurysm in 1999 and began berating their three daughters,
Do you know that being berated means to be abused mentally, which can and is worse then being abused physically. I am speaking from personal experience as I was being mentally abused as a child by my mother and I still feel the effects and I am almost 64 years old.
Also according to the article his younges daughter had been trying to give her a glass of water to drink