Abused Panhandle girl finds comfort in a new home
FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. (AP) – Her favorite color is purple. Taylor Swift is her No. 1 artist, edging out Hannah Montana, who’s too babyish for her now.
She likes winter because it’s cold, ice cream when it’s chocolate and spaghetti for dinner.
Katelyn Colbie Pendleton is a normal 12-year-old girl, if you don’t look too closely. If you don’t notice the pink, bubbly scars on her hand and thigh. If you don’t see the faint red lines on her arms and back that linger from repeated whippings.
Katelyn is a survivor of horrific child abuse.
“Don’t be scared to tell anyone if you’ve been hurt,” the blonde, blue-eyed girl said when asked why she’s willing to share her story. “I just wanted to help other people.”
In the spring of 2008, the young girl was at the center of an investigation of one of the worst child abuse cases Okaloosa County lawmen had ever seen.
Now, she’s the happily adopted daughter of Christie and Jeff Pendleton.
“She deserves a normal life,” Christie said. “She’s extremely smart and kindhearted. And she didn’t come from a background that would have created that at all.”
Katelyn was born Jamie Leighanna Brooks on Feb. 6, 1997, to Velma Hare, a woman with a long history of prostitution and drug use. Her father is a registered sex offender.
In 2006, Hare gave her then-9-year-old daughter to a friend, Kizza Monika Lopez. Initially, Lopez a mother and a college student, took the girl on shopping trips and treated her kindly.
But that gradually changed. By 2007, Katelyn was being intermittently starved and force-fed until she vomited. She ate leftovers and spoiled food off the floor and slept in a closet.
Lopez and another woman, Melonea Feagin, whipped her with plastic coat hangers, threw scalding water on her in the bathtub and then set the pan used to heat the water on her bare leg. They also splashed bleach on her wounds, picked her up by the hair and punched her in the face.
In December 2007, Lopez took Katelyn out of Calvary Christian Academy where she had been in fifth grade. She told school officials that she planned to home-school the child.
Instead, the abuse escalated.
In early April, the women took Katelyn’s hand and plunged it into a pot of boiling water. Twice. The first time, her hand wasn’t in long enough.
A few days later, an anonymous tip led investigators to the home where Katelyn had been tortured. But Lopez learned that they were coming and had arranged for another child Katelyn’s age to be at the house that day. The investigator met that child and ruled the abuse report unfounded.
The tipster called back and said he’d seen the other child leaving the house and she was not the one they needed to examine.
Investigators returned and found Katelyn lying on the floor, starved, dehydrated, beaten and ill from untreated wounds. At the hospital, they had to cut the clothes off of her bloodied back.
Lopez and Feagin were charged with aggravated child abuse causing great bodily harm. Lopez, who was the girl’s guardian, also was charged with neglect causing great bodily harm. Lopez tried to blame Feagin; she said she had no idea the abuse was going on. But when the women were sentenced in January, Lopez received 20 years in prison, while Feagin got 15. The judge cried. The prosecutor read a letter Katelyn had written.
“I will forever and ever have the scars that remind me of that time that they both caused me a lot of pain, fear and suffering,” she wrote. “I would like both of them to be in jail forever because they were supposed to take care of me and instead they both did very bad things to me.”