Atlanta man gets more than 150 years in prison for starving daughter and abusing other children
Rodney McWeay, 33, was sentenced Thursday in Treasure McWeay's death. He was also convicted of other counts stemming from the abuse of his two other children, who are 3 and 4, authorities said.
'Treasure suffered from hunger, thirst and neglect at the hands of her father, who used violence and control to keep her and her brothers from the help they needed,' Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in a statement.
McWeay was arrested in December 2023 after Treasure was pronounced dead at an Atlanta hospital. Police warrants stated that she was extremely malnourished and 'her face appeared to be sunken in around the eyes and cheekbones,' The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. An autopsy found that she weighed only 24 pounds.
McWeay did not have custody of any of his children at the time, authorities said. About five months before Treasure died, he had kidnapped them from their mother's home in Maryland and prevented Georgia child protection workers from speaking to them, the Journal-Constitution reported.
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Soon after taking power in December 2023, Milei dissolved the undersecretariat for protection against gender violence and closed the ministry of women. 'For the first time in nearly 40 years, Argentina has no dedicated institution to prevent, punish and eradicate gender-based violence,' says Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty International Argentina. The administration has also slashed funding for programmes aimed at combating gender violence. The Acompañar programme, which provided financial and psychological assistance for victims of gender-based violence, has been drastically defunded, while the 144 emergency hotline lost 42% of its staff by July 2024. 'The government is turning its back on women facing violence,' says Belski. In November, Argentina was the only country to vote against a UN general assembly resolution to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls. 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Soledad Deza, the Tucumán lawyer supporting Yramain's family and the president of Fundación Mujeres Por Mujeres (Women for Women Foundation), shared data showing a sharp drop in court-issued protection orders since Milei took office. Sign up to Global Dispatch Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team after newsletter promotion Between January and September 2024, according to information obtained from the authorities by Deza and shared with the Guardian, family courts in Tucumán issued 4,856 protection orders, while criminal courts issued 754. By comparison, across the whole of 2023, those figures were 7,549 and 2,448 respectively. Deza says that women in the province have struggled to access support because of funding cuts, and that the justice system is failing to investigate their reports. 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'And that no other woman is killed because the authorities didn't take control.'
