The Nation - News from May 22, 1987

Janitors in a Philadelphia housing project discovered the mummified body of a 3-year-old girl kneeling as if in prayer in an abandoned apartment where she was imprisoned and left to starve by her mother, police said. Clarise Smith, 22, was charged with murder, child abuse and abuse of corpse in the starvation death of her daughter, Sylvia Regina Smith, police said. They said the body was in a mummified condition from being in the warm, dry room for a period of several months.