THIS is the shocking moment a mother broke down in court as she was handed a life sentence after she left her 14-year-old child to starve to death.

Footage showed Julie Miller sobbing as she was jailed for life following her teen daughter’s death.

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Mum Julie sobbed as she pleaded guilty to child abuseCredit: AP
 

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Kyneddi Miller, 14, was found dead and ’emaciated to a skeletal state’ in April 2024Credit: Family Handout
 

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Mum Julie told the court that she ‘loved’ her daughter, who died of starvationCredit: AP
Kyneddi Miller, 14, was found dead and “emaciated to a skeletal state” on the bathroom floor of her West Virginia home in April 2024.

She had been suffering from an untreated eating disorder and is thought to have only left the house twice in four years.

Judge Stacy Nowicki-Eldridge said: “This child literally starved to death.

“No child should ever have to go through that.”

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Mum Julie pleaded guilty to death of a child by child abuse after not getting help for Kyneddi in the four years before her death.

Her daughter died of a starvation-induced heart attack, weighing just 4 stone.

For at least four or five days before her death, Kyneddi lay alone and unable to move on a bathroom floor, according to prosecutor Dan Holstein.

He told the court: “Kyneddi Miller’s life was taken just from sheer – I don’t know if it was selfishness or where it comes from, but for someone to kill their own daughter by means of not just a single act but a daily letting them waste away into nothing.

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“The agony that must have felt for Kyneddi and caused – suffering alone, essentially.”

Julie and her parents, Jerry and Donna Stone, failed to give Kyneddi “necessary food and medical care during the months immediately preceding the death”, court documents alleged.

Mum Julie said that “loved” her daughter as she addressed Boone County Court.

She sobbed: “I miss her every second of every day. She was my world and was the best little girl since day one.”

Kyneddi’s older sister also gave an emotional statement to the court.

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Mum Julie was given a life sentence for child abuseCredit: AP
 

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Kyneddi died of a starvation-induced heart attack, weighing just 4 stoneCredit: Family Handout
She said: “There are no words that can properly convey to you that a piece of sunlight was ripped out of the Earth the day that she died.

“It’ll never come back. No matter what I do, there’s nothing that will ever take the pain out of my chest.

Kyneddi died in April 2024.

She had been homeschooled for three years.

Her death send shockwaves through the state, prompting a federal audit which found the state had failed to properly respond to reports of child abuse and neglect.

Two months after Kyneddi’s death, officials said police had been summoned to check on the teen in 2023, but had found no evidence of abuse.

An informal suggestion that she needed mental health resources was given, but no follow-up checks were ever made.