"It's tit-for-tat," Daniels said. "In South-Central, we don't do that. I'm just telling you how it is."
Daniels said she finally decided to talk to Brown about her suspicions around the time she tried to throw an impromptu party for the boy's 5th birthday.
She wrote his name on a birthday cake and hoped he could celebrate at her house with her daughter, whose birthday was around the same time in May. She went to Brown's apartment to ask if her son could go to the party.
"Hell, nah," Brown replied, according to Daniels.
Around the same time, Daniels said she saw Brown "whip the baby butt naked." She said her 11-year-old daughter, Rayonna, had seen the boy hung from a door by his shirt and forced to eat on his hands and knees "like a dog," she said.
"We had heard that the little boy got messed up," Daniels said.
In response to the case, community activists on Friday canvassed the neighborhood around 110th and Figueroa streets, where Brown recently lived with the boy, with fliers that read: "Break the Silence on Child Abuse in South L.A.! Help Make Sure a Starkeisha Brown Torture Case Never Happens Again."
"We have seen time and time again that people say, 'I've seen child abuse, I've heard it, I've heard screams, but I do nothing,' " said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. "People are so reluctant to speak out on it."
Hutchinson and others said suspicion and fear of authorities runs deep in parts of South L.A. -- and that extends beyond the police to social service agencies and other public providers. They said some people are afraid that calling authorities could end up making the family situation worse -- particularly if the child is taken into foster care. Others fear authorities might end up checking on them.
Hutchinson said residents are reluctant to call authorities in such cases because of a strong belief that it's wrong to interfere in the way other parents treat their children.
They "feel that children, no matter what, are really the province of the mother and everything they do is their right and their business," he said. "Someone hears a child screaming, they're not going to say anything because their thinking is that's their child, that's their business."
It took a stranger -- the person on the Green Line platform -- to finally call the county with a tip.
