Woman who was held captive by a cult member and starved until she weighed just 59 pounds graduates from high school 18 months after her rescue
Daily Mail, UK/May 24, 2016
By Jessica Chia
A woman who was starved, assaulted, and held against her will in a hotel room for years has beaten the odds to receive her high school diploma just 18 months after she was rescued.
Iasia Sweeting, 22, was overcome with emotion when she walked the stage at Dekalb School of the Arts in Georgia to a standing ovation on Monday night.
Tears streamed down her face as she later told WSBTV: 'It's a culmination of every type of emotion that you could ever feel. It's fear, it's happiness, it's anger that it didn't happen sooner, but it's appreciation that it did happen.
Calvin McIntosh held Sweeting captive and raised the alarm after he brought their dead daughter's abused body into a hospital in Gwinnett County, Georgia, according to authorities.
Sweeting was found catatonic, emaciated and near death four years after she disappeared in 2010.
Sweeting, who was rescued 18 months ago, narrowly escaped death to receive her diploma.
The principal raised her arm in triumph, and students who were not even in high school when Sweeting was a student stood and applauded her success.
She celebrated the milestone with family and friends, and admitted there were several moments in her life where she didn't think she would live to see the day.
'God just made everything possible that I’ve been praying for all these years. This is what I've been wanting to see,' her mother, Elvis Morgan, told WSBTV.
Sweeting disappeared in 2010 when she was a sophomore, and police deemed her an 'at-risk runaway', despite family members who contested the idea that she would vanish on her own volition.
Four years later, Sweeting was discovered emaciated and covered in blankets at the Extended Stay Hotel in Peachtree Corners, 15 miles away from her high school.
Weighing just 59 pounds, Sweeting was in 'desperate need of medical attention', according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Calvin McIntosh and his daughter Najlaa Mcintosh were charged for the murder of 15-month-old Alcenti Mcintosh, who McIntosh fathered with Sweeting.
McIntosh was arrested after he brought the infant, who had already died from starvation, into a hospital.
Authorities searched the hotel room, and found Najlaa, Sweeting, one five-year-old, and two three-year-olds.
McIntosh had fathered two children with his own daughter Najlaa, and two more with Sweeting.
He is said to have ordered Najilaa to deprive the children and Iasia of food if they were disobedient.
'Copious amounts of literature and notes in reference to ritualistic behavior and the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors' were also found in the hotel room, investigators said.
The cult mixes black supremacist ideas with worship of the Egyptians and their pyramids and adheres to strange beliefs involving UFOs, the Illuminati and Bilderbergers.
Both Calvin and Najlaa McIntosh pleaded not guilty in March 2015 and are still held in jail without bail.
Mcintosh was charged with one count of felony murder, one count of malice murder, four counts of cruelty to children in the first degree, one count of cruelty to children in the second degree, one count of cruelty to a physically disabled adult, one count of rape, one count of incest and one count of aggravated sodomy.
Najlaa Mcintosh was charged with one count of felony murder, one count of malice murder, four counts of cruelty to children in the first degree, one count of cruelty to children in the second degree and one count of cruelty to a physically disabled adult.
The three children found in the hotel room are in the custody of Georgia's Division of Family and Children Services.
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