Witness: Girl's earlier house had 'secret room'
Posted on 12/07/2002 2:27:17 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Witness: Girl's earlier house had 'secret room'
12/07/2002
The squalid closet in a Hutchins trailer wasn't the first prison for an 8-year-old Hutchins girl.
Ralph Hewitt discovered a "secret room" in another home where the girl had lived when he renovated a Waxahachie home he bought two years ago.
"We thought there was a dog or an animal kept there," Mr. Hewitt said Friday, testifying in the trial of the girl's stepfather, Kenneth Atkinson. "A pallet was torn up, and there were feces everywhere."
Mr. Atkinson is charged with serious bodily injury to a child and sexual abuse. He is being tried only on the bodily injury charge. A jury sentenced the girl's mother, Barbara Atkinson, in January to life in prison.
Prosecutors rested their case Friday afternoon. The defense is scheduled to begin its case Monday morning.
 The defense case for Kenneth Atkinson (left), shown with lawyer Malcolm Dade, begins Monday. Prosecutors rested their case Friday against Mr. Atkinson, who is charged with serious bodily injury to a child after his stepdaughter was discovered living in a squalid closet. (MICHAEL AINSWORTH / DMN) |
In the corner of the closet-size room, Mr. Hewitt said, workmen also spotted a child's toilet-training seat over a hole in the flooring that was used as a toilet.
Describing the house as filled with almost 3 tons of trash and furniture, Mr. Hewitt told the jury his workmen discovered a "secret room" sealed off from the rest of the bug-infested home.
Throughout Friday's testimony, Mr. Atkinson's defense attorney, Malcolm Dade, attempted to minimize the abuse inflicted on the girl, as well as his client's role in the abuse.
"You're acting like what she's recovering from was an accident. This is on purpose. This is over starvation and beating," the girl's adopted mother, Sabrina Kavanaugh, told Mr. Dade under cross-examination. "She's going to have more scars in her little mind and soul than anybody in the entire courtroom can ever fathom. You will never know what that baby went through."
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Police rescued the girl from the closet in June 2001 after Mr. Atkinson told a neighbor about the child. She was kept in the closet and other confined spaces for months at a time. She was 8 but told police she was 2 years old.
Bill and Sabrina Kavanaugh adopted the child in July of this year. They tried to adopt her at birth but were forced to return her because of a technicality.
Although she has greatly improved, she will struggle emotionally and physically for the rest of her life, her parents and therapists say.
The girl, now 9, can't do something as simple as jump rope because of extensive muscle atrophy and other injuries. Just last month, she learned to jump from one area to another in therapy, Mrs. Kavanaugh said.
Although she has grown mentally, she doesn't comprehend things the way an average 9-year-old does, Mrs. Kavanaugh said.
Recently, the family went to buy a lizard at a pet store. The girl wanted a turtle instead. But the turtle was sold. The child didn't understand what "sold" meant. The Kavanaughs also had to explain what it means to be full after eating.
"It's just everyday things we take for granted that she has no earthly clue about," Mrs. Kavanaugh said. "We deal with 2-year-old problems, we deal with 3-year-old problems. We deal with 4-year-old problems. In some ways she has progressed from a 2-year-old to a 9-year-old."
Doctors initially told the Kavanaughs to lock the cabinets and refrigerator to keep the child from gorging on food. Now they can leave food sitting out and the child won't touch it.
The girl takes gymnastics and works with her mother every day after school on reading, math and spelling.
A therapist and a psychologist said the girl suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome brought on by neglect and abuse that may have begun when she was 8 months old.
"She was either victimized or treated as if she didn't exist," Dr. Barbara Rila testified. Despite making "enormous" progress since being removed from the Atkinson home, the girl is intellectually retarded because of the neglect since.
Hutchins Assistant Chief David Landers testified that Mr. Atkinson, not the girl's mother, added a lock to the top of the closet and fixed the door to lock from the inside.
"He said when they moved to Hutchins, right from the beginning, he said Barbie instructed him to change the lock and put another lock at the top," Chief Landers said.
"And like a child, he did what he was told," Mr. Dade said while crossing-examining the chief.
E-mail jemily@dallasnews.com
Not before having him spend some time in the general population of a maximum security prison. They don't take kindly to this kind of criminal. They give the "honest" criminals a bad name.
The so called "mother". What a freak.
And I'm sure she was using restraint when she said this to the idiot defense attorney.
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