At age 9, Christina Corrigan weighed at least 237 pounds. She weighed 680 pounds when she was found dead four years later, when her heart simply gave out.
Now her mother, who left her alone while making a run to the grocery store, is on trial on a felony child abuse charge. Her trial could end this week, with the defense expected to finish presenting its case Monday.The trial and Christina's short life have become public lightning rods for attitudes toward food and weight. Activists for the obese say society - not Christina's mother - is more to blame for her daughter's death.
"It's the last safe prejudice," said Frances White, president of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. "This woman would not be on trial if her daughter had any other condition beside being large."
Prosecutors say they charged Marlene Corrigan strictly because of the condition in which her daughter's body was found on Nov. 19, 1996 - lying on a dirty sheet, scarred with bedsores and with feces trapped in the folds of her flesh.
Christina Corrigan spent the last months of her life lying in front of a television, barely able to hoist herself up to go to the bathroom, according to police reports.
Defense attorneys portray Marlene Corrigan as a caring but overworked single mother who was working full time and checking in frequently on two sick parents while raising Christina and her brother, Chad. And they say police exaggerated the apartment's conditions.
Defense attorney Michael Cardoza said Christina didn't tell her mother about the bedsores. He suggested the girl may have had a disorder called Prader-Willi Syndrome, whose sufferers have a raging desire to eat, a slow metabolism and a tendency to pick at sores.
Prosecutors question why Christina had not seen a doctor since 1992 and dropped out of school after the sixth grade.
Doctors saw Christina 90 times during her life - the last time when she was 9 and weighed at least 237 pounds. Instead of calling in specialists they advised her to "eat less, exercise more."
And school officials, according to Cardoza, ignored Marlene Corrigan's requests for help in getting Christina up a steep hill to a junior high school.