Girl, 11, rescued from deplorable conditions after being starved, isolated

BROWN COUNTY, Ohio (WJW) -- An 11-year-old girl who was starved and neglected is free after enduring years of horrendous living conditions.

According to FOX 19, the Brown County Prosecutor's Office said the girl was starved and forced to sleep on a urine-stained mattress in a trailer.

Investigators were alerted of the situation by the a teacher who was administering an online test to the girl. The instructor heard the 11-year-old student say she was hungry and only allowed to eat a small plate of rice each day.

When authorities found the girl in September, she was severely malnourished, weighing just just 47 pounds, and living in filth. Investigators believe she had been isolated at home and mistreated for at least the past three years.

“They had her in diapers,” Brown County Prosecutor Zac Corbin told FOX 19. “She was in a diaper when the officer went out and found her, presumably because there was no restroom in that trailer.”

The girl's legal custodian, 47-year-old Margaret Breeze, of Georgetown, was charged two weeks ago with child endangering, kidnapping and felonious assault. She has since pleaded not guilty and remains in the county jail, about 40 miles east of Cincinnati.

The girl had been living with Breeze since she was 6 years old after a court in Kentucky granted her custody, Corbin said. It wasn't immediately clear whether they were related.

Breeze homeschooled the girl and last to took her to a doctor when she was 8, he said. Records from that visit showed she weighed 51 pounds then, meaning she had lost 4 pounds during the past three years, Corbin said.

Breeze is married, and there were other children living in the house, but there were no signs they had been mistreated, he said. Those children also have been removed from the home, a converted church that sat alongside a cemetery.