Leaving aside the RO, here’s a news story about a negligent mother who caused her daughter’s death. The daughter was handicapped and confined to bed and the mother wasn’t feeding her.
A horrible story obviously but I’m wondering how it’s even possible for a fourteen year old to weight only twenty-eight pounds. That’s what a two year old weighs.
I don’t want to sound morbid but wouldn’t a person die before they lost that much weight?
[deleted snarky response]
This Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_palsy#Signs_and_symptoms states that a person with cerebral palsy may be smaller than the average person due to the issues with muscle tone, etc. So while this girl was horribly underweight, she may have been smaller than the average 14 year old to begin with.
There is also a disorder called nutritional dwarfism: a child who is sufficiently malnourished will not grow properly. Growth requires raw materials to create the new tissue. Due to what both that and what CatherineZeta mentions, I think it quite likely that the girl was significantly smaller than you are imagining.
Here is a follow-up story (Not for the faint of heart). There’s a picture (enlargeable) of the girl from some time when she was in better health, and she doesn’t look dwarfish. What a horror.
It appears from the other photos that her nurse was eating all of her food.