Her parents beat her when she wouldn't eat. When she did eat, she threw up sometimes.

She'd only been in Utah for three weeks when someone called paramedics to report the young daughter of these vagabonds was having a severe allergic reaction to some kind of medication.

But paramedics noticed suspicious injuries on the girl and whisked her to Ogden's McKay-Dee Medical Center. Within hours the girl was flown by medical helicopter to Primary Children's Medical Center.

Doctors found she had a broken finger, broken ribs, cigarette burns on her chest and small bumps all over her body from the infection. She had bruises on her head, back and bottom from what prosecutors believe was a hairbrush.

Parents told police Yasmin suffered the injuries falling off her bike.

The young girl finally died from an infection due to child abuse at Primary Children's Medical Center in August 2002. The official cause of death: homicide by battered child syndrome.

Craig and Sawsan Whitelaw pleaded guilty to murder in 2002 and were sentenced to five years to life in prison.

Frustrated Weber County authorities who investigated Yasmin's case said someone should have done something to protect the child as the couple traveled from state to state. Later police found out the couple had escaped child welfare investigations in two states.

Hands, fists and feet were used as weapons on more than half of the 225 children younger than 4 who were murdered in the United States in 2003, according to FBI statistics. Head injuries, usually from shaking, and abdominal injuries from beating are the leading causes of trauma death for children younger than 1.

And the fatal blows on children — in Utah and throughout the nation — are usually the culmination of previous abuse. Half of the children who die from shaking show signs of past injuries including broken ribs, bruises and brain swelling.

At least 36 children age 6 or younger in Utah have been killed as a result of physical abuse or neglect since 1999, according to a Deseret Morning News search of court records and newspaper archives.

Shaking and beating were the most common causes of death. Children also were strangled, suffocated and squeezed. Two died in intentionally set fires. A brother and sister had their throats slashed.

The Utah Division of Child and Family Services intervened in about one-third of those families before the child died, according to a Deseret Morning News analysis of summary reports of the Utah Department of Human Services Child Fatality Review Committee. Child welfare workers' "emphasis on family preservation" in one case contributed to the suffocation death of a 6-month-old boy in 2001, according to the committee's findings.