According to several family members, the mother had been unable to raise the girl because of her own drug addiction and other problems.
The girl's maternal grandmother took her in at age 3 to her single-story rancher in Cape St. Claire. Growing up, she got good grades, joined a dance team and began modeling and acting. She had a bit part in The Invasion, a Nicole Kidman movie filmed in Baltimore.
But teenage friction with her grandmother over rules and a strong desire to be closer with her mother pushed the then-16-year-old to move in early 2007 to the Annapolis housing project where her mother and two younger half-sisters lived.
The mother soon set her up with the 59-year-old man, who repeatedly paid $150 to the girl and $50 to the mother for arranging encounters in the apartment or in the bathroom of a neighbor's apartment, according to charging documents.
"After the first time I was crying and shaking," the girl said, according to charging documents. "My mom gave me a line of coke to calm me down. I made my mom do it first because I was worried it would kill me or something. She did a line and then I did one. She told me it would be OK."
She also had sex with a 24-year-old man who paid with crack cocaine, according to charging documents.
The abuse continued from February until June 2007, when the teenager told her father's girlfriend, and they went to police.
The mother was arrested in an early-morning bust at her apartment in February and charged with child abuse, sexual solicitation of a minor and prostitution. She was held at the county jail for two months and has since been staying with a friend in Lanham on home detention.
The teen, meanwhile, has struggled.
Now 17 and living with her maternal grandmother again, she and her relatives said in interviews that she has been in and out of psychiatric treatment centers in Maryland and Texas, where she now lives.
nicole.fuller@baltsun.com
