A set of Oklahoma parents are facing a long prison sentence after a jury recommended 130 years each after the two were convicted for what a police officer called the “worst case of child abuse” he’d ever seen.
Aislyn Miller, 24, and Kevin Fowler, 25, are parents to 9-month-old twin girls, who weighed roughly 8 pounds each when they were hospitalized last December. The parents were arrested after a visit with their children to an urgent care facility, PEOPLE reports.
Videos by PopCulture.com
An investigation discovered the family’s house had cat feces smeared on the walls and maggots in the girls’ playpen, according to testimony from an investigator for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services.
Police say a maggot came out of one of the emaciated girl’s wounds.
Jurors in the case convicted the two on five counts of child neglect, later recommending that each person serve 30 years each in prison on the first four counts and 10 years on the fifth count.
The parents told police that they were overwhelmed as the working parents of four small children without enough outside help. The couple’s defense attorney said during an earlier hearing that their request for government aid was denied, as they both had full-time jobs.
Maternal grandparents John and Cathey Miller also are set to be tried next April on allegations that they enabled the abuse and neglect.
Paternal grandmother Rita Fowler also faces several charges on child neglect related to the case.
“It’s what we would term as shocking and heinous,” said Kristi Simpson, an investigator for the state Department of Human Services in a preliminary hearing.
Nurses at the urgent care clinic noted that both twins had severe diaper rash and bed sores, along with feces in one child’s ear and a strand of hair wrapped so tightly around a finger of the other child that the finger had become infected.
One child was described in police reports as looking like a “skeleton.”
Miller allegedly said the couple didn’t have health insurance, allowing the children’s health problems to worsen.
Formal sentencing will take place in November.
