For six years, starting when she was 3, a Dayton girl was confined to this area when she wasn’t in school, police say. Two dressers served as a barricade between her world and that of her grandparents, their two sons and the girl’s brother.
The 9-year-old’s grandparents, Brian and Rivae Hart, are in the Montgomery County Jail facing felony charges of kidnapping and child endangering. According to police, the Harts were granted custody of the girl and her brother by a Virginia judge sometime around 2004.
That the apparent abuse was allowed to go on so long was due to an appearance of normalcy. The three boys in Apartment 6 at 4825 Hassan Circle were frequently seen by neighbors and often played with their children.
Erica Osborne, 28, who lived in an apartment behind the family from November 2008 to July 2010, said she didn’t even realize a girl the same age as her daughter lived there.
Yet there were warning signs. In 2005, neighbor Shelli Ridge, then a premed student at Wright State University, said she once heard the girl scream in pain and twice called 911 about her suspicions of child abuse.
Officials at the girl’s school, Wright Brothers PreK-8 School at Grant, said they too had concerns because of the girl’s thinning hair and gaunt appearance. But Principal Shawna Welch said the child did well in school and exhibited no other signals.
Gloria Matthews, who moved in next door to the Harts last June, said Rivae Hart told her about putting the girl in the bathroom as punishment, but Matthews assumed it was for a brief timeout: “I had no idea she was in there all the time.”
Matthews said Hart also confided a secret from her own childhood: Her mother would lock her in a closet, tie her arm to the hanger rod and then go out drinking.
“She told me all kinds of gruesome stories,” Matthews said. Her mother wasn’t mean to Hart’s brother, she said, “just her.”
About the Author