A cruel mother has been accused of starving to death her 20-month-old daughter — leaving her weighing just 10 pounds from getting just 250 calories a day.
Sausha Myers, 29, was arrested after her two children were found emaciated at her home in St. Louis last week — some two years after she had suddenly cut contact with her family, according to police and her mother.
The 20-month-old girl, identified by her grandmother as Sky, did not have a pulse and was rushed to the hospital, where she was declared dead.
She was covered in bed sores and weighed just 10 pounds, less than half of what is considered a healthy weight for her age, according to a criminal complaint obtained by KSDK.
Sky’s 3-year-old sister Star weighed 17 pounds and was also taken to the hospital’s intensive care unit for treatment, the complaint states.
Police said Star had started to grow lanugo — a type of soft body hair that people develop as a survival mechanism when they don’t have enough body fat to keep them warm, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Myers told police that she was the sole caregiver of the two children and was aware they were not developing properly. Neither child had seen a doctor in more than a year, and she had mainly been feeding the Sky a diet of yogurt, vegetable pouches and fruit pouches, according to the complaint.
Detectives determined that the diet amounted to about 250 calories per day, KMOV reported.
Myers’ mother, Driyah Boss Milon, said through tears in a video she posted on Facebook that her daughter was a good mother who had “out of the blue” stopped talking to her family about two years ago.
“The next time I see my youngest grandbaby is going to be at a funeral home,” she sobbed, maintaining that her daughter must have been going through mental illness.
“No one has known where she’s been. I’ve literally looked for her over the past two years. We’ve sent emails, her son has tried to call her …” she said in the video.
“The last we heard is that she is in St. Louis, but nobody knew where because she cut all communication. She blocked everybody, all family members,” she added.
“I don’t know what my daughter was going through. I don’t know. I don’t because that’s not my daughter. I’ve watched her with her children. I watched my baby with her children. And anybody that knows my daughter knows that she loved her babies. And anybody that hears this story that knows her immediately was like, ‘No, she had to be going through some kind of postpartum [depression].’
“She had to have some type of mental illness or something, because there is no way my daughter would have just starved her babies like that,” she said.
Myers has three older children from a previous relationship who were taken from her by Child Protective Services during the pandemic, Milon said, without revealing additional details. Those children now live with their grandmother in Las Vegas.
Myers is charged with two counts of child abuse and is being held without bond.
Milon, meanwhile, has been having to work with government agencies to try and secure the 1-year-old’s body for a proper funeral and to gain custody of the three-year-old, who is currently with CPS.
