Mom charged in child’s starvation death
Newport News woman faces manslaughter, and two neglect counts
NEWPORT NEWS — The two sisters were often kept in a bedroom at a Newport News apartment, court records say, sometimes going days without eating.
And when they managed to get some food — such as peanut butter or blueberries — they were often punished.
Then one of them died of starvation, authorities say.
After a yearlong investigation, their mother, 26-year-old Jacqueline Christine Wingo, is charged with involuntary manslaughter in the Sept. 12, 2019, death of her 4-year-old child, Lilliana Rose Douglas.
She’s also charged with two felony child neglect counts, one for each of her girls.
Donna Price, the administrator for the state medical examiner’s office in Norfolk, said Friday that Lilliana died of “starvation and dehydration,” with the manner of death ruled a homicide.
The older daughter — who was 5 at the time of her sister ’s death — told a police detective a year ago that she and Lilliana would often try to find food to eat.
“She stated they were grounded for stealing food, peanut butter and blueberries,” said the criminal complaint affidavit filed this week by detective William Gordon. “She further stated (that) they went days without food.”
Last month, that sister added that their mother would often oversleep, telling Gordon that “mommy turned the door knob with the latch around, and they could not get out of the room until mommy opened the door.”
Officers were called to a 7-Eleven on Jefferson Avenue in Denbigh at 9:10 p.m. on Sept. 12, 2019, to check into a report that a girl was unresponsive in a parked car.
“Upon arrival, the officer observed the child not breathing and began CPR until medics arrived on scene,” Newport
News police spokesman Brandon Maynard wrote in an email this week.
Lilliana was pronounced dead at Mary Immaculate Hospital an hour later.
Gordon wrote in the criminal complaint that he arrived at the hospital as Lilliana’s body was soon to be taken for an autopsy. She wore only a diaper, he said, and had dirt under her fingernails and in the crevice of her neck.
“I also observed her hip bones were protruding from the skin above the diaper,” Gordon wrote. “I could see several rib bones.” When a technician turned her body over to take a picture, he said, “I observed the bones of her spinal column.”
When Gordon interviewed Wingo, who lived at Treasure Court in Denbigh, she told him that “Lilliana was fine a few minutes prior to the incident,” the complaint said.
Wingo said her girls were in the car as she and her boyfriend were delivering meals as drivers for the Door Dash service. They stopped at the 7-Eleven, where she went inside “to buy drinks and chips for dinner,” Gordon said she told him. But when Wingo got back to the car, she said, Lilliana was unresponsive.
The detective said she “wasn’t able to explain” what had caused her daughter’s unresponsiveness. He wrote that Wingo told him that her daughters “were being punished for getting out of their room and getting into the peanut butter and going into the fridge in the middle of the night.”
The mother told Gordon that Lilliana was dirty because she sometimes lost track of the girls’ bath days. “When asked about the diaper, Ms. Wingo stated she ran out of underwear and she does not have enough money to get any more,” but had some diapers to use.
Gordon added that Wingo told him that she was in the process of “turning her children over to the state.”
Her boyfriend, Scott Ellis, told the police investigator that the girls were wearing diapers because they didn’t like being in the car and would “soil themselves in order to go back home.” Sometimes, Ellis added, Lilliana would kick the seat, and he and Wingo would have to hold her legs down.
Ellis told the detective that “Lilliana would eat and eat but not gain weight,” with Gordon adding that Ellis told him he had last disciplined the 4-year-old three weeks before her death “for lying about stealing food.”
The girls’ maternal grandmother told Gordon that she began caring for the girls when they were weeks old — but that Wingo and her ex-husband had moved out with them about nine months earlier.
The complaint doesn’t say how much Lilliana’s weight had changed over that time, but it cites medical records showing that the older sister lost a significant amount of weight for her size.
She weighed 52 pounds in April of 2018, when she was just shy of 4 years old, but was only 43 pounds in August 2019, a month after turning 5. (Then she gained six pounds over the next three weeks, to 49 pounds).
Wingo is being held without bond at the Newport News City Jail, with a court hearing slated for Dec. 9 in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. Her attorney, Angela M. Davis, did not return a call Friday seeking comment.