Pair Accused of Beating, Imprisoning Daughter : Antelope Valley: The couple deny the allegations. The child says she was released from her room only to go to school.

An Antelope Valley couple has been charged with child abuse after their 9-year-old daughter told authorities they beat her and used a burglar alarm to imprison her in her bedroom for months, releasing her only to attend school, officials said Tuesday.

The girl’s stepmother, Donna Lynn Fell, 33, and her husband Fred W. Fell, 39, who lived in the remote Antelope Acres community, each have been charged with felony child abuse and corporal injury to a child. They remain free on bail pending a scheduled preliminary hearing Tuesday in Lancaster, officials said.

But in a telephone interview Tuesday night, the couple denied the allegations, saying they never kept their daughter prisoner, that it was a baby-sitter who abused the girl, whom they described as emotionally disturbed.

The couple were arrested last week after a school nurse saw bruises on their daughter Amy, who turned 10 on Sunday. According to accounts from the girl, the baby-sitter and the baby-sitter’s boyfriend included in the sheriff’s report, the mother whipped, punched, kicked and hit the girl in the head with a frying pan.

The girl, who weighed only 60 pounds and was described by deputies as “extremely malnourished as well as unbathed,” said her parents had kept her in her bedroom since last August except for allowing her out to attend school and dinner. If she left the room without permission, the girl said, she would not be fed.

The prosecutor for the case and the investigating sheriff’s deputies could not be reached for comment late Tuesday. But according to the sheriff’s reports filed with the criminal case, the parents allegedly used a burglar alarm and a motion detector to warn them if the girl left her room.

The girl told deputies that if she did get dinner, she then had to immediately wash the dishes and return to her bedroom until the next morning when her mother would release her, the sheriff’s report said. The girl said she could not use the bathroom during the night, deputies added.

Donna Fell, described by deputies as unemployed, and Fred Fell, a plasterer at Los Angeles County’s High Desert Hospital in Lancaster, were released on bail Friday, the day after criminal charges were filed in the case, according to a spokeswoman at the Sheriff’s Information Bureau.

Deputies who went to the family’s house on Feb. 23 also arrested another couple, identified as Aimee Lynn Isenburg, 18, a sometime baby-sitter, and Christopher R. Braden, 21, who said he had been renting living quarters there. They were released last week without being charged, the spokeswoman said.

“We’re not guilty. We never did anything at all,” Donna Fell said Tuesday night. She and her husband said that what deputies described as a burglar alarm was actually an alarm designed to allow parents to monitor small children that beeped when the girl’s bedroom door was opened. But they said the girl was not forced to stay in her bedroom or starved.

The couple said they had the alarm because their daughter would rummage about the house at night, and once put razor blades in Braden and Isenburg’s clothes. The couple said they had the motion detector in their house to warn them if Braden and Isenburg, who lived in a trailer in the yard, tried to come inside.

And Donna Fell said Isenburg was taking care of the girl for the week before both couples were arrested, and that her husband once saw Isenburg holding a pot and screaming at the girl. But in the sheriff’s report, Braden and Isenburg claimed it was Donna Fell who had abused the girl.