A Missouri mother is facing accusations that she fatally starved her 20-month-old daughter, who authorities say weighed only 10 pounds after allegedly being fed roughly 250 calories a day.
Sausha Myers, 29, was taken into custody last week after police found her two young children severely malnourished inside her St. Louis home — about two years after she abruptly stopped communicating with relatives, according to investigators and her mother.
The toddler, identified by her grandmother as Sky, had no pulse when emergency responders found her and was rushed to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
According to a criminal complaint obtained by KSDK, Sky had bed sores across her body and weighed just 10 pounds — less than half the weight considered healthy for a child her age.
Her 3-year-old sister, Star, weighed 17 pounds and was also hospitalized in intensive care for treatment, the complaint says.
Investigators said Star had begun developing lanugo, the fine, soft body hair that can appear as a survival response when a person lacks enough body fat to stay warm, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Myers allegedly told police she was the only person caring for the girls and knew they were not developing as they should. The complaint states that neither child had been seen by a doctor in more than a year, and that Sky was primarily being fed yogurt, vegetable pouches and fruit pouches.
Detectives later calculated that the diet provided approximately 250 calories a day, KMOV reported.
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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.
