deny someone from something

I read this construction recently, in the sentence A person who hoards goods, denies them from their neighbour.  The more acceptable form is to deny something to someone. I think the problem is that in this sentence A person who hoards goods, denies them to their neighbour, to is an indicator of the dative. It is not a preposition with the basic meaning of ‘towards or in the direction of’ .  Neighbour is in the dative case because it is the indirect object of the verb.  Them (the goods) is the direct object because that is what is being denied. But who is the person who is affected by this? The neighbour. 

We rarely get to discuss the dative case over breakfast these days, so the strongest feeling that we have about the preposition to is that it means ‘towards’.  This does not seem to work in a sentence where something is being withheld from someone, not sent in their direction. So we have switched from to to from, because from has that sense of taking away.   We end up with deny from as a parallel construction to withhold from.