State sued in Carnation starvation case

A Carnation girl who was so emaciated she wore a size 2 shoe and weighed 48 pounds at age 14 had begged a social worker to put her in foster care more than three years before her father and stepmother were arrested in 2008, according to a lawsuit filed against the state.

The civil suit, filed in King County Superior Court last week, claims the girl's "nightmare of abuse and torture" extended to her younger brother, who was forced to participate in the abuse of his sister and was "essentially her jailer."

It accuses Child Protective Services (CPS) of not intervening, and says the abuse escalated in the years following the girl's first efforts to get help in 2005.

"There is no explanation for this," said Tim Tesh, an attorney who filed the suit on behalf of the girl and her brother, who now live with relatives in New Mexico. "The social worker who went out to the home missed clear signs of the severity of what was happening at that house," Tesh said.

Tesh said he is seeking $25 million for the girl and $15 million for her brother, who Tesh says was sometimes forced to guard the girl and alert his stepmother if she tried to sneak food or water.

According to police, the girl had been dehydrated for so long that she lost all of her teeth, court documents show.

Her father, Jon Pomeroy, 44, and her stepmother, Rebecca Long, 46, were sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison after they pleaded guilty to criminal mistreatment.

Sherry Hill, a spokeswoman for CPS, which is run by the state Department of Social and Health Services, said the agency is unable to comment on pending litigation.

However, Hill said, "We take to heart any case in which harm is inflicted on a child with whom we've had contact, take each case personally and use each case as a lesson to evaluate our training and practice."

According to court documents, the King County Sheriff's Office was first contacted in 2005 by a school that oversaw the girl's home-schooling program after she'd told her teachers she was afraid to go home.

The girl told deputies that her stepmother kept her locked in a room and deprived her of food and water as punishment, court records say.

According to the lawsuit, a CPS social worker visited the family home two weeks later where the girl "begged the CPS worker to get her out of there."

According to the lawsuit, the social worker found that the complaint of neglect had merit but left after Long promised she would remove the lock and take the girl to a doctor and that they would both seek mental-health treatment.

Long did not follow through and neither did CPS, the lawsuit claims.

In 2008, a neighbor reported hearing a child screaming in pain for hours.

Investigators with the sheriff's office said in court documents that Long routinely restricted the girl's water intake to several ounces a day, supervised her in the bathroom to prevent her from drinking extra water and duct-taped her hands and forced her head into the toilet.

She and her brother "were forced to sleep on the floor in the same room as their parents, and a heavy dresser was pushed in front of the door to keep her from sneaking out and getting water," police said.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com