With dread, Gwen slowly turned around. Charnae lay on her back on the dirt floor, silent and barely moving. Her skeletal legs curled to the side. Her arms were tucked beneath her bony torso. Her eyes were half open, vacant and lifeless. Ribs poked through her grimy T-shirt. Dust covered her pants with a Pocahontas print.
"That was the last time I ever saw Charnae," Gwen said recently.
The long torturous murder of Charnae Wise in 1997 was one of the most horrific cases of child abuse in city history. Charlene Wise, a mother of eight, did more than kill one of her own. She scarred her seven surviving children, now ages 14 to 32. It's been 11 years since Wise was sentenced to 28 to 56 years behind bars, yet she continues to haunt them from a prison cell 400 miles away.
Gwen can't shake that last vision of Charnae in the basement inside the house on Harper Street near 30th.
"I was so scared," Gwen, now 22, whispered recently. "I replay that all the time. I can't get it out of my head.
"All the time I feel such guilt. My friends tell me, 'It's not your fault. You were a child.' But what if I'd told one person?" she asked. "What if I'd snuck her more food?"
Her mom had banished Charnae and her brother Dante, then 7, to the basement because she called them difficult. They needed to be punished, she'd say. In a May 12, 1999 Daily News article, Wise revealed a more candid, albeit cold-hearted reason: She just didn't want to be "interrupted from getting high."
On that late August afternoon in 1997, Wise shattered the light herself. She allowed Dante, who was bruised, cut and emaciated but able to walk, to come upstairs. She knew Charnae was near death.
So she closed the door.
She went to a party and let her daughter die.
