PORTLAND (NEWS CENTER Maine) — For the first time, the mother of Kendall Chick, who was abused to death by her caretakers, is speaking out.
“I don’t understand. These were people I knew. I trusted these people,” said Alicia Chick.
Kendall Chick was born on November 26, 2013.
She had just turned four when she died inside the home of her grandfather, Stephen Hood, and his fiancée, Shawna Gatto, who is now in jail charged with her murder. Police took Kendall away from her mother, Alicia, while they lived in a Lewiston apartment in 2016 due to Alicia’s drug addiction.
“She’d stayed with them many, many times, and Kendall’s come back happy," Chick said. "I’m like, ‘She seems to love it there.’ That’s where I would like her to go if the findings are all good, and everything’s all set. That’s where I want her to go.”
The 36-year-old mother said she requested that Kendall live with her grandfather after she stayed with neighbors for a short time.
Chick was staying at the Oxford Street Shelter when she got the news that her daughter had died on December 8, 2017. Chick had not seen her daughter for a year and a half.
When NEWS CENTER Maine’s Tory Ryden met Chick, she was panhandling in the median on Forest Avenue in Portland with a sign that pled for help, explaining her daughter had been murdered.
“It was the most God-awful, horrific, brutal way of my daughter being murdered.”
According to police records, four-year-old Kendall died of a blunt-force injury to the abdomen that caused lacerations to her pancreas and other internal injuries. Police said Kendall had also sustained blunt-force trauma to the head and other injuries that showed signs of “chronic physiological stress.”
Police arrested Shawna Gatto six days after Kendall’s death.
Though she has been living in the shadows, Alicia Chick says she has followed the case closely and wants answers for why the state, specifically the Department of Health and Human Services, received calls of concern over Kendall’s safety but did nothing.
Chick says she’s looking for a lawyer to help file a suit against DHHS, and doesn’t want this to happen to another child in Maine.
“The state needs to do better. They need to do their job more thoroughly.”
Alicia Chick is also looking for answers as to the whereabouts of her daughter’s remains saying she was never notified about their location.
“I want to know if there was a ceremony. I want to know if she was cremated. I want to know if she was buried.”
Shawna Gatto pleaded not guilty to charges of depraved indifference murder and is being held at the Two Bridges Regional Jail.
Maine Governor Paul LePage last week admitted the state’s outdated child protection system played a role in the deaths of two children who were abused for months; Marissa Kennedy and Kendall Chick.
Governor LePage is calling for changes to “make sure these children did not die in vain”.