Father accused of caging 6-year-old daughter pleads guilty
Jacob William Weight Sr. did not hesitate when President Judge Steven P. Leskinen asked him why he had his 6-year-old-daughter hogtied naked in a cage.
“Mainly because she was doing stuff she wasn’t supposed to…She’d get up, get in the fridge and run through the house and keeping people up” Weight said matter-of-factly.
On Friday, the 38-year-old Brownsville man entered a general plea to more than 150 charges, including aggravated assault, unlawful restraint and false imprisonment.
Both Weight and the child’s mother, Mimi Frost, 34, were arrested after police were called to the couple’s home in the 1300 block of Sheridan Avenue on Jan. 7, 2024, because their 6-year-old daughter was unresponsive.
Along with being hogtied naked, police said the 6-year-old was also forced to eat her own excrement, urinated on, beat with handle grips and shot with BB guns.
According to police, the child was malnourished and had bruises, scars and open sores on her body. A report from Children’s Hospital described the girl as being “severely hypothermic” with a temperature below 90 degrees.
When Leskinen asked Weight who forced the child in the cage, Weight responded with “we both did.”
Last month Fayette County Judge Joseph M. George Jr. sentenced Frost, who entered a general plea to more than 100 charges, to 35 to 70 years in prison.
While guilty pleas include a specific sentence agreed upon by prosecutors and the defendant, sentences in general pleas, like the ones entered by Weight and Frost, are determined by the judge.
Leskinen said that the sentencing hearing, which is scheduled for next month, will probably take longer than normal so he could hear evidence from both sides before deciding on a sentence.
At Frost’s sentencing hearing, District Attorney Mike Auble said that even though the child is now happy and physically healing, it could take a long time to recover from the mental wounds caused by her birth parents.
“(There’s going to be) lasting effects of having a 6-year old consume her own urine and feces and to live in a cage, to be hogtied with her hands behind her back and her feet bound to her hands,” Aubele said at the time.