A mother from Milwaukee has been charged with chronic neglect after her 16-year-old son died from severe malnutrition weighing just 42 pounds.
A detective said that the teen’s “skeletal structure was visible underneath the skin,” Fox 8 reported.
Iraida Pizarro-Osorio, the mother, told the police that she had gone to Puerto Rico with the 16-year-old and his two siblings.
She added that when he “became sick and was not eating,” he was taken to a doctor in Puerto Rico, but got denied access to medical care because she didn’t have insurance.
Pizarro-Osorio took her son to the Sixteenth Street Health Center when she got back to Milwaukee on Sept. 4, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
She said she brought her son to the medical center after he was found “unresponsive.”
The criminal complaint read that he was “unresponsive, had a faint pulse, and appeared extremely emaciated.”
He weighed 42 pounds when he died, which places him in the zero percentile on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s growth chart for boys ages 2-20, WISN reported.
Conflicting Story
The 32-year-old mother’s boyfriend gave his side of the story that conflicted with the mother’s account of what happened.
The boyfriend told the police that Pizarro-Osorio and the 16-year-old never went to Puerto Rico because he saw them nearly every day for two weeks before the teen died, WISN reported.
Investigators said that the mother confessed that the story she told about traveling to Puerto Rico was a lie.
Pizarro-Osorio and her three children lived in the 1200 block of South 9th Street, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
She added that her son couldn’t gain weight due to various health conditions.
Pizarro-Osorio’s daughter told the investigators that her mother would put a chain lock on the door to keep the 16-year-old inside his bedroom.
The 32-year-old mother also told the police that the chain lock was already there when she moved in two years ago, which she later admitted to lying about, investigators said.
The mother would feed him and then lock the door before she left to prevent him from leaving in the middle of the night, according to authorities.
Child protective services checked up on him twice a week for two months in 2017 and stopped visiting after the 16-year-old reached a weight of 70 pounds.
Investigators reported that the mother didn’t want to take her son to the hospital because she feared that child protective services would take him from her.
Pizarro-Osorio is currently on bail for $35,000, according to the Milwaukee County Inmate Search.
