SLOVAN, Pa. (AP) — A Pennsylvania woman has been ordered to stand trial on charges she forced her daughter to eat cat litter and started to sew the girl’s mouth shut.
Forty-six-year-old Rana Cooper told reporters she is “a very good mother” after Thursday’s preliminary hearing.
Immediately after the hearing, her 51-year-old husband, Richard Cooper, was arraigned on a charge of endangering the welfare of a child. Authorities say he didn’t stop the abuse. Online court records don’t list an attorney for him and no one answered the family’s phone Friday.
The girl, now 16, testified she was abused because her mother considered her “embarrassing to the family,” which has seven sons.
The girl says she suffered other abuse, including that her mother tried to sew the girl’s mouth but stopped at one jab of the needle.
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