Mich. woman convicted in death of quadriplegic girl sentenced to minimum of 10 years in prison

Mom gets 10 or more years in disabled girl’s death

FLINT, Mich. — Saying the child suffered “severe neglect in every way,” a judge sentenced a woman to 10 years in prison Monday for the death of her adopted, quadriplegic daughter, whose starved body was discovered under mothballs in a storage unit.

Lorrie Thomas of Flint was not equipped to adopt her niece, Shylae Thomas, when she already had a house full of kids, said Genesee County Circuit Judge Judith Fullerton.

“She left this child in the crib to rot and die,” Fullerton said.

The body of 9-year-old Shylae was found in a plastic bin last April. Authorities believe she had been dead for six weeks, a victim of starvation.

Thomas pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter in December.

“I regret that y’all think I don’t have remorse,” the 40-year-old Thomas tearfully said Monday. “Not one person helped me. … I am not a monster. I did not kill Shylae.”

Shylae became a quadriplegic shortly after birth in 1999 when she nearly suffocated in her crib.

Thomas adopted the child in 2003. A child welfare worker, responding last spring to a complaint about Thomas, couldn’t find Shylae in the house and called Flint police, who found the body in the storage unit. Authorities claimed Thomas stopped providing liquid nutrition through a permanent feeding tube in the girl’s stomach.

Assistant Prosecutor Marcie Mabry said Shylae’s body — with bones poking through her skin — looked worse than the victims at Auschwitz, Nazi Germany’s World War II concentration camp.

Standing just 2 feet from Thomas in the courtroom, Mabry said she was speaking as Shylae when she asked the judge for a tough sentence.

“I did not need to die like that,” Mabry said. “I was forgotten and I laid up in that crib for a year and a half. I needed to be turned. I needed to be touched. I needed to be fed.

“I was basically a paycheck,” Mabry said, referring to the nearly $3,000-a-month state subsidy Thomas received to take care of a disabled child.

The sentencing guidelines called for a minimum of three and half years in prison. But the judge said there were “compelling reasons” for a much longer sentence.

Thomas will serve at least 10 years but could be in prison for as long as 15, the maximum for involuntary manslaughter. Her release is up to the state parole board.

This was “involuntary manslaughter by severe neglect in every way,” Fullerton said.

Rachel Thomas, Lorrie Thomas’ sister and Shylae’s biological mother, was in the courtroom.

“I love you Lorrie,” she called. “I wouldn’t have sent you to prison.”

There were seven other children in Lorrie Thomas’ home when Shylae died, including two grandchildren.