After living on a single food item, a four-year-old child was discovered trapped alive in her own New York house.

On Friday, May 2, the girl’s mother, Lisa Cotton, 38, was discovered dead at their house when her oldest daughter, who was worried, went to the Bronx flat to see how her family was doing.

The woman’s landlord had called Lisa’s father, 71-year-old Hubert Cotton, to enquire as to whether Lisa had left the house.

“I had been trying to call her for days and she never answered. I figured she didn’t answer me because she didn’t want me to talk to me,” he told The New York Post.

The terrible discovery was made by Lisa’s oldest daughter, as paramedics pronounced eight-year-old Nazir Millien and his mother Lisa dead at the spot.

“When she came in, [Nazir] was slumped over,” Cotton told the New York Post. Lisa’s daughter then apparently went looking for her mother only to find four-year-old Promise ‘feeding herself with chocolate’ on her mother’s bed.

“She picked her up and ran out and called the police,” Cotton continued.

The New York Post obtained a transcript of the 911 call in which Lisa’s daughter said that Nazir’s body had “bugs crawling on it.”

Promise was sent to a nearby hospital in a stable state, however she was later released and is currently living with her grandfather.

t makes sense that the recent occurrences have disturbed the young girl.

Speaking of his granddaughter, Cotton said, “She hasn’t said anything. She’s a baby. She looks at me sometimes, you know? Like she knows something.”

“We don’t know anything, we’re trying to find out.”

Although neighbours reported to authorities that they hadn’t seen Lisa in more than two weeks, a police source told The New York Post that there was no reason to be alarmed because there didn’t seem to be any odours or evidence of a break-in.

“[The police] said they’d be back in a few days. One of the social workers said she was trying to get a court order to have the door broken in,” a neighbor said.

Eric Perez, who lives upstairs, added: “The landlord hadn’t done wellness checks, people had called, neighbors called. It just smells like rat infested… the exterminator said the same thing — the smell is similar to rats and even death.”

In the meantime, Hubert must cope with the loss of both his daughter and grandchild in addition to planning the funerals.

He added, “I’m sorry. Two of them. How am I going to get the money? To bury both of them?”

How Lisa, who had asthma, and her son passed away is still a mystery. The police are still looking into it.