This is a story about how deadly emotional harm gets passed from generation to generation.

Richard and Jennete Killpack of Springville, Utah, are on trial  for killing their four-year-old adopted daughter by pouring more than two liters of water down her throat. Cassandra died when her blood sodium level plummeted and her brain swelled.

Cassandra had been diagnosed with severe reactive attachment disorder, and the Killpacks said that they'd been advised to use this method to discipline her.

Drinking this much water -- as an adult -- has been advocated as a way to cleanse the system.  A couple women I work with drink 2.5 liters a day -- not at once.

What the Killpacks did sounds a lot like the torture we're hearing about in Iraq's Abu Graib prison.

After first tying Cassandra's arms behind her back, Jennete Killpack poured glass after glass of water down the girl's throat until she fell off a bar stool and hit her head, according to [the couple's seven-year-old daughter] Nicole.

This isn't the first time a kid with RAD has died during some kind of alternative therapy. It seems like you'd have to be crazy to do something like this, and the Killpacks may have been driven temporarily insane by the difficulties of dealing with a RAD child.

Meanwhile, seven-year-old Nicole watched it all. What kind of a parent will she be when she grows up?