'Clearly preventable': Teen girl lived on nuggets and sausages before fatal asthma attack
A "morbidly obese" girl, who died from an asthma attack following parental neglect, begged authorities to have her "putrid", rodent-infested home cleaned months before her death.
The girl died a women's size 18, living off a diet of chicken nuggets and sausages, her aunt admitting to the Daily Telegraph it was "a miracle she made it to the age of 13".
Relatives have accused the Department of Family and Community Services of putting financial concerns above the child's welfare, the paper reports.
The department was notified about the potential abuse in the home 19 times – the earliest recorded intervention coming when the girl was just two years old.
The girl, identified only as Elle for legal reasons, was never taken from her parents and interventions were minimal due to "competing priorities" within the agency.
"(FACS) is inadequately funded," her aunt said.
"Someone will carry out an assessment and a senior manager downgrades it.
"That's how Elle fell through the net."
Details about the cesspit of a home the girl lived in have been revealed by the newspaper, including photos from inside the mould-ridden dwelling in the NSW Illawarra region.
The photos, taken around the time of Elle's death, came after months of repeated orders to the parents to clean up the house.
They show walls eaten away by mice, mould covering the bathroom ceiling and lawns that had grown "waste high".
Notes taken by FACS staff describe a home "overridden by mice" to the point the rodents had "chewed holes in the walls and ceiling".
The 13-year-old girl who called the sty her home died following an asthma attack on April 26, 2014.
Her parents failed to take Elle to hospital before she died, returning from the pub at 4pm to find her "yelling and crying" for her asthma puffer.
The teen begged her parents to take her to hospital, but her father "simply went back to his garage bed and removed his hearing aids", documents reveal.
The mother suffers from mental illness and was no help either.
The following day, Elle was found "slumped over... and not breathing" in the lounge room.
She weighed 112.5 kilograms at the time of death, giving the 13-year-old a body mass index of 41, placing her in the category of extreme obesity.
A coronial inquest heard evidence that had the parents taken their daughter to hospital she would likely have survived.
The inquest also found FACS "did not intervene in any meaningful way during" and that Elle's death was "clearly preventable".
Opposition spokeswoman on FACS Tania Mihailuk said the girl "was let down by the government’s systemic under-resourcing".
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A spokeswoman for the department said a 90-minute training session that focused on the "the identification, assessment, and response to chronic neglect, including medical neglect" has been developed since Elle's death.
The training package is to be deployed to all frontline FACS staff, as well as NSW Police and NSW Health workers, within the first quarter of this year, the spokeswoman said.
News break - January 24
