Documents provide details about Rebekah Kinner’s upbringing

A newly released psychological evaluation of Rebekah Kinner reveals, in detail, her account of what happened in the weeks and days leading up to her 2-year-old daughter, Kinsley's, death.

The evaluation also provides more details about the 23-year-old’s upbringing.

Kinner told a psychologist she was the sixth of her mother’s eight children. Her parents were never married, she said, and “my mom gave me to my grandparents and said she didn’t want us.”

Sometimes, though, Kinner and her sister went and stayed with her mother, who she described as a drug and alcohol abuser.

“She neglected them … they wore dirty clothes to school and stunk,” Rebekah’s grandmother, Nina Kinner, said of those visits. “They had lice … the girls never had anything to eat.”

Kinner’s estranged mother told her she “should burn in hell … she should have killed me (had an abortion),” the psychologist wrote.

Kinner’s father was a truck driver, she said, and she only saw him a few days a month.

“I would get so excited to see him, but it was like I was invisible to him,” she told the psychologist.

She reported being bullied as a child; when she was 13, she said she was beaten and raped by a neighbor, something her grandmother corroborated. Kinner also told the psychologist she had no friends in school.

“Everybody always thought I was weird because I didn’t talk,” she said. “I always stayed to myself.”

Rebekah also said she was ridiculed for being too skinny.

“Ms. Kinner’s grandmother reported that Ms. Kinner used to come home from school crying because the other children made fun of her for not having a mother,” the psychologist wrote.

After the neighbor reportedly attacked her, Kinner said the other kids told her “he should have killed me when he had the chance.”

Still, she graduated from Madison High School, was never held back and never was in special education classes. Kinner told the psychologist that the longest job she ever had was working two-and-a-half years as a cashier for a fast-food restaurant; before Kinsley’s death, she’d last worked in September as a gas station cashier. She also had worked as a state-tested nurse’s aide and a mail carrier.

Her only mental health treatment came after the neighbor attacked her, she said, and she stopped going because she “felt judged.” At the Butler County Jail, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and unspecified mood disorder. They initially prescribed Prozac for her, then added two more medications: Prazosin and Lamictal.

Before her December arrest, Kinner had not gotten in trouble with the law.

This article contains reporting from our news partner WCPO 9 On Your Side.

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