Newport News mother gets 5 years in daughter’s death; 4-year-old died from ‘starvation and dehydration’

A Newport News mother was sentenced to five years behind bars last week in her 4-year-old daughter’s starvation death in 2019.

Jacqueline Christine Wingo, 28, was accused of keeping Lilliana Rose Douglas and her sister in a bedroom without adequately feeding them. Court records said the girls would be punished for “stealing food” — such as peanut butter and blueberries — in the middle of the night.

The State Medical Examiner’s Office listed “starvation and dehydration” as the cause of Lilliana’s death. But a prosecutor said a medical examiner believes the girl, who weighed 28 pounds at the time of her death, was fed too quickly while severely malnourished, causing her heart to give out.

Wingo pleaded guilty in March to involuntary manslaughter and felony child neglect in her daughter’s death. Another child neglect count involving Lilliana’s older sister was dropped as part of the plea agreement.

Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jennifer Titter asked a judge for 15 years, the max for the two convictions. Wingo’s lawyer, Angela M. Davis, asked for probation and no jail time, in line with discretionary state sentencing guidelines.

Circuit Court Judge Bryant L. Sugg sentenced Wingo to five years of active time on the two counts, with another 10 years suspended.

Just before 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 12, 2019, Wingo called police from outside a 7-Eleven, saying her daughter was unresponsive in a parked car. Lilliana was pronounced dead at the hospital 40 minutes later, with a detective noting she was wearing only a diaper, with hip and rib bones protruding and her spinal column visible.

In the children’s bedroom at the Denbigh apartment, police found no working lights, a single crib mattress on the floor, a shoe box with dirty diapers, and a locked closet with toys inside, according to a statement of facts agreed to by both sides and read by a prosecutor at Wingo’s guilty plea.

Lilliana’s sister told a detective the girls had gotten in trouble because they had stolen peanut butter and blueberries from the fridge, the statement said. While grounded, she said, “they would go days without food.”

The sister said her mother would latch the girls’ bedroom door at night to prevent them from getting out. Sometimes their mother would open the door to give them food, but “mommy was oversleeping, and they got hungrier and hungrier.”

As for using the bathroom, the girl said that she was able to hold it while in the locked bedroom, but that Lilliana “kept peeing in her diaper.”

Lilliana weighed 28 pounds at her autopsy, the statement said. That was down from 33 pounds a year and a half earlier, putting the child in the 5th percentile for her age. The report cited several indications of starvation, including stunted bone growth, an extremely thin fat layer, a “severely atrophied thymus” — a crucial part of the immune system — among others. The autopsy also indicated dehydration and “protein-calorie malnutrition,” the statement of facts said.

Titter said in an interview Thursday that Lilliana had food in her stomach, but that medical examiners believe she wasn’t able to properly digest it.

“You cannot refeed someone who has been chronically malnourished the way you would feed somebody who has just gone like a day without food,” Titter said. “We believe that she was fed at a rate ... that basically caused her heart to fail.”

Court documents said that on Sept. 12, 2019, Wingo and her boyfriend, Scott Ellis, were delivering meals for Door Dash, with the girls in the back seat.

Wingo told police that Lilliana was “fine” when they stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy sandwiches — but was unresponsive when Wingo got back to the car.

During a 2019 interview with police, Wingo acknowledged the girls were punished for “getting out of their room and getting into the peanut butter and going into the fridge in the middle of the night,” Newport News homicide detective Bill Gordon wrote in a criminal complaint.

Wingo told Gordon the reason Lilliana was still in a diaper was that she didn’t have money to buy her underwear. But she had some spare diapers lying around. She told Gordon she planned to turn the children over “to the state.”

Ellis, for his part, told Gordon the girls were wearing diapers because they would intentionally “soil themselves” in the car to go back home. He told the detective that Lilliana would “eat and eat but would not gain weight,” and that he last disciplined her three weeks earlier “for lying about stealing food.”

The Daily Press asked Titter why Wingo wasn’t charged with felony homicide — a form of second-degree murder often brought in accidental deaths stemming from child neglect.

Titter, who inherited the case from other prosecutors, said she considered doing that. But she and her superiors decided against it, she said, signing off on the plea agreement so Lilliana’s sister didn’t have to testify at trial.

“We went ahead and let (Wingo) plead to the manslaughter in order to spare her other daughter from having to go through the trauma of testifying in court against her mother,” Titter said. The decision, she said, was made in consultation with the girl’s family. “It was not a light decision,” she said.

Lilliana’s sister, the prosecutor said, drew a picture for the judge of her mother in jail. That sister had also lost significant weight, but gained much of it back quickly after getting regular meals at school.

Wingo’s attorney, Davis, didn’t return phone calls this week.

Titter said the defense contended at sentencing that Lilliana’s death was “poverty-driven,” that the girl had food in her stomach when she died, and that Wingo had just purchased two sandwiches for the family. She said the defense also noted the children were taken in for a doctor’s visit a few weeks before Lilliana’s death, but the doctor did not report the matter to authorities.

But Titter, for her part, maintained 15 years was warranted for Wingo’s actions that led to her child’s death.

Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com