Virginia mother charged in 4-year-old daughter’s starvation death
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – Virginia authorities arrested Jacqueline Wingo on Thursday in connection to both the starvation death of her 4-year-old daughter in 2019 and the neglect of her then 5-year-old daughter.
Wingo, 26, is charged with involuntary manslaughter in the Sept. 12, 2019, death of Lilliana Rose Douglas as well as two felony child neglect counts, one for each girl, WVEC reported.
Donna Price, the district administrator for the State Medical Examiner’s office in Norfolk, told the Daily Press that Lilliana died of “starvation and dehydration,” with the manner of death ruled a homicide.
According to WVEC, an officer responded to a 7-Eleven on Jefferson Avenue on Sept. 12, 2019, for a call regarding an unconscious child having difficulty breathing. The officer started CPR upon arrival because the girl was not breathing, and she died later at an area hospital.
The older daughter told investigators that she and her younger sister often “went days without food” and had been disciplined for stealing food, such as peanut butter and blueberries, the Daily Press reported.
Homicide detective William Gordon told the newspaper that he personally saw Lilliana’s body at the hospital before the child was transported for an autopsy and “observed her hip bones were protruding from the skin above the diaper.”
“I could see several rib bones,” Gordon recounted, noting that when a technician turned Lilliana’s body over to take a picture he “observed the bones of her spinal column.”
