Small Area of the screen "sort of" unresponsive.

My girlfriend's G4 (VZW) has an odd problem. A small area of the screen is "sort of" unresponsive. She first mentioned that she can't send messages via hangouts or SMS, "The send button doesn't work." After further inspection, the small area of the screen where the send button is located doesn't respond to touch (it works if you minimize the keyboard and the send button moves to the bottom of the screen. Another example is I can't toggle checkboxes in a list if they are located in that area.

I thought this was a straight forward broken screen issue, but the screen actually does detect the touch. Under developer options I enabled "Show touches" and "Show touch data". When I press that area of the screen, the visual feedback does show up. If I drag my finger across the area the trace shows up fine (no dead zone). When I select "Show GPU view updates" it shows a red rectangle in that area of the screen, indicating something is going on there.

Any one have an idea what could be going on?

This Axon Pro Area is sort of dead, isn't it.

I guess since there is no support from ZTE with unlocking the bootloader, rooting, other roms, this Phone is quite dead in XDA.
Well, I still love my Axon Pro regardless.
It's has enough great features, to keep me from buying the Axon 7.