Grandmother Sentenced in Case of 9-Year-Old Granddaughter Who Starved to Death

A grandmother in Hawaii has been sentenced to 10 years of probation in connection with the starvation death of her 9-year-old granddaughter.

According to a press release shared on Facebook by the County of Hawai’i Office of the Prosecuting Attorney, 67-year-old Henrietta Stone was sentenced on Thursday, Feb. 13, by a Hilo Circuit Court judge, who ordered that she not serve any additional jail time after being in custody from 2017 to 2024 while awaiting trial.

Henrietta pleaded no contest to manslaughter on Feb. 6, the prosecutor’s office said. The Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported that she agreed to the charge in a deal with prosecutors, as she originally faced a second-degree murder charge. Prosecutors had asked for Henrietta to receive the maximum sentence, which is 20 years in prison.

Henrietta had custody of her granddaughter, 9-year-old Shaelynn Lehano-Stone, at the time of her death in 2016. The prosecutor’s office wrote that Shaelynn’s cause of death was malnutrition, and that she also was suffering from acute pneumonia and acute kidney infection. She weighed 45 pounds and was 53 inches tall at the time of her death.

“There aren’t words to describe my disappointment and frustration in the outcome of this case. Shaelynn and our community deserved much better. Her death was caused by the three people who she should have been able to trust the most,” prosecuting attorney Kelden Waltjen said in the press release. “We will not let this result discourage our ongoing efforts to protect our keiki [children].”

According to reports from local outlets KHON2, Hawaii News Now and the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, emergency personnel were called to Henrietta’s apartment in Hilo on June 28, 2016. There, they found Shaelynn emaciated and unconscious. She was taken to Hilo Medical Center, where she died a few hours later.

The apartment was the home of Henrietta, Shaelynn’s maternal grandmother, and the girl’s parents, 57-year-old Kevin Lehano and 41-year-old Tiffany Stone.

Both Kevin and Tiffany were also sentenced to 10 years of probation in 2021, according to prosecutors, after they both served two years in jail. Authorities who spoke in court said that all three of Shaelynn’s immediate family members prevented her from having food.

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“The refrigerators in that home, your honor, had alarms on them so she couldn’t access that food,” a prosecutor told the judge in 2021, per the Associated Press.

Hawaii News Now reported in 2020 that documents from the Department of Human Services’ Child Welfare agency showed that Shaelynn had been repeatedly removed from her home while her parents were caring for her and had been placed in foster care multiple times for alleged neglect.

The 9-year-old’s mother eventually signed custody of Shaelynn over to her grandmother around 2011, the outlet reported. In November 2015, Henrietta filed to pull Shaelynn out of school and homeschool her.

According to Hawaii News Now, an investigation into Shaelynn’s death found that she had experienced physical neglect, medical neglect, failure to thrive, psychological abuse, psychological neglect and physical abuse by all three family members.

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.