Ranot starved her 12-year-old stepdaughter, abused her.
AB Wire
Sheetal Ranot, the 35-year-old Indian American woman from Queens, New York, who beat and starved her 12-year-old stepdaughter Maya Ranot until she weighed just 58 pounds will spend 15 years in prison.
Ranot, of Ozone Park, was sentenced to the long prison term for abusing the child over a horrifying two-year period starting in 2012, reported The Daily News.
A Queens jury in July convicted Ranot of beating the girl numerous times with broom handles and a rolling pin, as well as locking her inside her bedroom without food for long periods, officials said.
On one occasion, Ranot beat the girl so badly with a broken metal broom handle that her wrist was sliced to the bone, leaving her in the hospital for weeks. The girl is currently living with her biological mother, according to authorities.
On another occasion, Ranot kicked the girl in the face, and on a third, slammed her in the face with a rolling pin, reported the Post.
“The defendant was the epitome of an evil stepmother,” Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said. “Not only did she refuse to provide basic nourishment for the child, but the defendant also wantonly beat and abused the girl inflicting pain still evident by the scars that mark her body today.”
After Ranot hit the girl with the broom handle on May 6, 2014, paramedics arrived at the house and found her lying in a pool of blood with the tendons of her left wrist exposed.
She was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center, where she underwent surgery on her wrist and one knee. Her body was covered with older bruises, marks and scars.
Rajesh Ranot, the victim’s biological father, is still facing trial on charges of assault, unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child.
The New York Times reporting on the abuse case, said the step mom treated Maya more like a servant than a daughter. Maya swept the front porch as her stepsiblings played. She washed dishes as her stepmother watched a movie. She wore flip-flops in winter.
“We know she wasn’t happy and she wasn’t eating,” one neighbor, Sunmattie Singh, 58, was quoted as saying. “She seemed like she was growing down instead of growing up. She was shrinking.”
For the city’s child welfare system, Maya’s case essentially amounted to a near miss. Her name could just as easily have been added to a sad roster of child deaths, another case of overlooked warning signs, reported the Times.
After the death in January of Myls Dobson, a 4-year-old boy under the agency’s supervision, Mayor Bill de Blasio made overhauling child protection a priority and announced an interagency children’s cabinet to increase collaboration across city agencies. Maya’s case shows how agencies do not always communicate. It also highlights the daily challenges facing caseworkers, who are encouraged to keep families together because it is usually in the child’s best interest, but who must also respond quickly when a child is in danger.
Maya’s ordeal started in 2011, when a custody dispute placed her with her father. Relatives and a friend of her mother, Ramona Roy, said Ranot fabricated claims that Roy abused Maya. Their contention is impossible to verify because Family Court records are not public.
In January 2011, Maya moved in with her father’s new family, on the top floor of Ranot’s red-and-white duplex, on a block filled largely with families of Indian descent by way of Guyana and Trinidad. There, everyone knew one another’s business. They knew that the Ranots were from India, that Ranot was a strict father who left to drive his taxi at 4 or 5 a.m. and came home late, and that Sheetal stayed home.
Neighbors said they noticed that Maya’s clothes were often dirty. With striking blue-green eyes and pale skin, she wore her hair in an unkempt braid. She was always doing chores and caring for her four stepsiblings, they said, who looked healthier and cleaner.
On Dec. 21, 2012, when Maya was in fifth grade, Sheetal kicked her in the face, the criminal complaint says. The Ranots had complained that Maya stole money to give to Roy. They had even called the police on Maya, she said. Her daughters Sabrina, 17, and Komal, 12, who visited the Ranots often, insisted that Maya was not mistreated and that she was fed.
When she was in sixth grade, Maya told her classmates she was being abused. They told the teacher. When a child welfare worker interviewed Maya, she said that “she fell on toys and a sibling threw a toy at her,” according to a law enforcement official. The police were not called.
Later, that year, Maya was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens. A doctor, Maya’s social worker and Detective Kevin Warmhold saw her swollen face, her dirty clothes and her weight of 58 pounds. Maya and Sheetal both said she had fallen from a ladder.
“There was definitely an issue with cleanliness,” Detective Warmhold said. “The father had the excuse: ‘She doesn’t like to have a bath. She fights with us.’ ”
On May 6, when Maya ended up in the pool of blood in her kitchen, her stepmother was at home. Her father was working. In her second emergency room visit in three weeks, Maya was seen by a doctor who noticed “various bruises, marks and scars,” the criminal complaint says. Her stepmother told neighbors that Maya had tried to kill herself with a kitchen knife. Initially, Maya said the same. Finally, the authorities sent Maya to live with an aunt.
Sheetal was first arrested on abuse charges on July 29. When her husband flew home from India three days later, he was arrested at the airport.
Sheetal faces up to 32 years in prison. Her husband could serve up to seven years behind bars.
The Ranots are now out on bail and back at their apartment. Maya’s four stepsiblings have been placed in foster care, reported the Times. Maya now weighs more than 72 pounds.