Uploaded June 2010 | Updated September 2026, 1 minute ago
A year after a suburban 4-year-old's gruesome death helped force a state review of child abuse investigations in Houston, there's little else to show that Emma Thompson passed through this world. She's buried next to a grandfather she never met and no formal headstone is placed on her tiny grave, which features a humble funeral home marker and half-dead petunias.
That changes today as prosecutors begin jury selection in the first of two trials to determine how Emma — a sexually abused child found with 80 bruises, a severed pancreas and fractured skull — died on June 27, 2009, and if her mother, registered nurse Abigail Young, 34, failed to prevent the injuries that ultimately killed the preschooler.
"Emma was a precious 4-year-old girl and she deserves justice, and that's what we hope to get," said Colleen Barnett, the Harris County prosecutor trying the case.
Young faces up to life in prison if convicted on the one count of injury to a child by omission. Her boyfriend at the time, Lucas Coe, 28, is scheduled to be tried in September in Emma's aggravated sexual assault.
A year after a suburban 4-year-old's gruesome death helped force a state review of child abuse investigations in Houston, there's little else to show that Emma Thompson passed through this world. She's buried next to a grandfather she never met and no formal headstone is placed on her tiny grave, which features a humble funeral home marker and half-dead petunias.
That changes today as prosecutors begin jury selection in the first of two trials to determine how Emma — a sexually abused child found with 80 bruises, a severed pancreas and fractured skull — died on June 27, 2009, and if her mother, registered nurse Abigail Young, 34, failed to prevent the injuries that ultimately killed the preschooler.
"Emma was a precious 4-year-old girl and she deserves justice, and that's what we hope to get," said Colleen Barnett, the Harris County prosecutor trying the case.
Young faces up to life in prison if convicted on the one count of injury to a child by omission. Her boyfriend at the time, Lucas Coe, 28, is scheduled to be tried in September in Emma's aggravated sexual assault.
