Henreitta Stone.Photo:Hawaiʻi Police Department
Hawaiʻi Police Department
A grandmother in Hawaii has been sentenced to 10 years of probation in connection with the starvation death of her 9-year-old granddaughter.
Henrietta pleaded no contest to manslaughter on Feb. 6, the prosecutor’s office said. TheHawaii Tribune-Heraldreported that she agreed to the charge in a deal with prosecutors, as she originally faced a second-degree murder charge. Prosecutors had asked for Henrietta to receive the maximum sentence, which is 20 years in prison.
Henrietta had custody of her granddaughter, 9-year-old Shaelynn Lehano-Stone, at the time of her death in 2016. The prosecutor’s office wrote that Shaelynn’s cause of death was malnutrition, and that she also was suffering from acute pneumonia and acute kidney infection. She weighed 45 pounds and was 53 inches tall at the time of her death.
The Hilo Medical Center in Hawaii, where Shaelynn Lehano-Stone died in 2016.Google Maps
Google Maps
According to reports from local outletsKHON2,Hawaii News Nowand theHawaii Tribune-Herald,emergency personnel were called to Henrietta’s apartment in Hilo on June 28, 2016. There, they found Shaelynn emaciated and unconscious. She was taken to Hilo Medical Center, where she died a few hours later.
The apartment was the home of Henrietta, Shaelynn’s maternal grandmother, and the girl’s parents, 57-year-old Kevin Lehano and 41-year-old Tiffany Stone.
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“The refrigerators in that home, your honor, had alarms on them so she couldn’t access that food,” a prosecutor told the judge in 2021, per theAssociated Press.
Hawaii News Nowreported in 2020 that documents from the Department of Human Services’ Child Welfare agency showed that Shaelynn had been repeatedly removed from her home while her parents were caring for her and had been placed in foster care multiple times for alleged neglect.
The 9-year-old’s mother eventually signed custody of Shaelynn over to her grandmother around 2011, the outlet reported. In November 2015, Henrietta filed to pull Shaelynn out of school and homeschool her.
If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.
source: people.com
