A federal appeals court must decide whether the case of a 14-year-old girl who was forced to live with a 37-year-old school security guard for 10 years should move forward.

Chief U.S. District Judge Gary L. Lancaster last year dismissed the federal lawsuit filed by Tanya Kach. The McKeesport girl went missing in 1996 only to re-emerge 10 years later, claiming that she had been held against her will the entire time by Thomas Hose, who worked security at Cornell Middle School where Ms. Kach was then in eighth grade.

Judge Lancaster granted summary judgment in the case, finding that while Ms. Kach may have only been 14 at the time, she voluntarily went to live with Mr. Hose. He also said that even though she may not have recognized the constitutional nature of the harm she sustained, she did know that she had been wronged.

But Attorney Lawrence H. Fisher told a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in Pittsburgh yesterday that even though his client continued to physically age during her captivity, emotionally, she did not.

"She was 14 throughout the entire time," he argued. "Her development was stilted, stunted."

There was no way for Ms. Kach to recognize the entirety of what had happened to her, Mr. Fisher said.

But in his opinion last year, Judge Lancaster agreed with the defendants, including the city of McKeesport, individual police officers there and the McKeesport Area School District, that Ms. Kach's claims were prohibited because too much time had elapsed.

He found that any claims made by her were required to be filed within two years of she reached the age of 18.

That meant that the statute of limitations for her claims, he wrote, expired in October 2001.

Russell Lucas, an attorney representing the McKeesport Area School District, refused to characterize what happened to Ms. Kach on school grounds as molestation. He said that at most, Mr. Hose and Ms. Kach would kiss privately there.

But what he tried to hammer home to the court is that whatever harm Ms. Kach may have suffered because of the school district's actions, or lack of action, ended by 1996, when she went to live with Mr. Hose.

Judge D. Michael Fisher, who was on the appeals panel, specifically asked Ms. Kach's attorney to identify the harm.

"He held her in total isolation beyond the years of her childhood," Lawrence Fisher answered. "He made her a sex slave."

Further, she was deprived of her education, liberty and freedom, he said.

Throughout his argument, Mr. Fisher hammered on the horrific allegations -- that Ms. Kach was repeatedly raped; separated from the rest of society; forced to live in a bedroom and held captive by Mr. Hose.

Because of those circumstances, he insisted, the case must be sent back to Judge Lancaster's court to be heard on the merits.

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