A Pennsylvania mom has been charged for enabling and sometimes participating when her new boyfriend would savagely beat her 9-year-old daughter — torture that left the girl with serious brain damage, prosecutors said.
Julianne Lewis, 31, of West Chester was arraigned Thursday for her role in the sickening abuse of her daughter, who was hospitalized earlier with life-threatening injuries this week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Prosecutors allege that Lewis allowed her boyfriend of two months, Dimitrios Moscharis, to routinely beat her daughter — including with a clothes hanger, his hand, and a plastic rod — to discipline her over minor issues.
The girl had also been forced to walk up and down the stairs with her arms stretched out for hours at a time — in addition to repeatedly being forced into a closet for anywhere between 15 to 45 minutes with no food or water, the newspaper reported.
On Monday, Lewis called 911 to report that her daughter was not breathing after 34-year-old Moscharis disciplined her, prosecutors said.
She told investigators that she had been driving Lyft when Moscharis told her to come home immediately, authorities said. When she arrived home, she found her daughter fully-clothed, wet and unresponsive in the bathtub.
Emergency crews pulled the girl from the tub and brought her to the hospital, where she was in critical condition and placed on a ventilator, news station 6ABC reported.
She was determined to have injuries to her lungs, extensive bruising all over her body, and to have suffered brain damage that was likely the result of being deprived of oxygen for too long, prosecutors said.
Moscharis was charged earlier in the week with attempted homicide, while Lewis faces charges that include aggravated assault, child endangerment, false imprisonment.
“It is incomprehensible that a mother would not only engage in this horrific treatment of her child but also fail to intervene to protect her from abuse from a man she just met,” Chester County District Attorney Deb Ryan said in a statement, the Inquirer reported.
“She participated in a systemic abuse pattern that violated her duty of care and subjected her [daughter] to unimaginable acts of cruelty.”