A Georgia mom accused of starving her daughter to death will not serve time in jail.
According to the Hall County Sheriff’s Office, Porscha and her husband, Jerrail Maurice Mickens, 32, were arrested in October 2020, four months after their 5-year-old daughter, Kylie Mickens — who weighed approximately 7 lbs. — died at an Atlanta hospital.
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up forPEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletterfor breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.
After an investigation and an autopsy, detectives determined Kylie’s cause of death was homicide — more specifically, “dehydration and malnutrition due to medical neglect.”
In November 2020, Jerrail died in a motorcycle crash while out on bond,The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreports.
In court, Assistant District Attorney Anna Fowler argued that Kylie was “looking like a mummy” when she died, according toThe Gainesville Times.She reportedly weighed less than 6 lbs. at birth and about one pound more at her time of death.
“She was admitted to the hospital, at the report of every doctor who saw her, suffering from the worst case of malnutrition and dehydration that the doctors at [Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta] had ever seen,” Fowler said, per the outlet.
However, the defense argued that Kylie’s death was due to 1p36 deletion syndrome, a rare chromosomal disorder which causes intellectual disability, abnormalities of the skeleton, weak muscle tone and difficulty swallowing, according to the National Institutes of Health.
According to WSB, Porscha took the stand and said that due to her daughter’s condition, she both gained and lost weight on a day-to-day basis.
“I didn’t realize she was dying. [When] her body shut down, I had seen that before, so I didn’t think that she was dying,” Porscha reportedly testified.
Friends and family members claimed she provided care for her daughter and had taken her to more than a dozen medical professionals, according to the station.
While the defense argued for 25 years of prison time, Judge C. Andrew Fuller ultimately handed down a sentence of probation, only.
“It should go without saying that the court’s sentence does not lessen the value of Kylie’s life,” he added, according toThe Gainesville Times.
source: people.com
