A 25-year-old Tennessee woman is facing charges after police found her one-year-old missing baby’s body in the wall of the woman’s home.
According to Chattanooga Daily News, officers visited the woman’s home last week regarding her missing child per the request of Child Youth Services. Initially, the woman told a Child Youth Services investigator that her baby was in North Carolina.
After investigating this claim, Child Youth Services determined the child was not in North Carolina and called upon police for assistance in the matter.
The woman eventually revealed that her baby had died in February — FEBRUARY, AS IN MONTHS AGO — due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and that she had wrapped the baby in a blanket, placed it in a crate, and put the crate inside a hole in their wall. She had then covered the hole with new drywall and painted over it.
Police obtained a search warrant and found the baby’s remains inside the wall of the home.
Why might the woman have done something like this? Police report she informed them that neither she nor the baby’s father could afford a proper burial.
That’s definitely sad. Sad enough to put a baby in a wall? NO. But sad nonetheless.
As for her claim regarding the baby’s cause of death being Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), officials are still investigating that aspect.
SIDS is the sudden, unexplained death of a baby typically less than a year of age. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unexpected infant death claims the lives of approximately 3,400 babies per year in the United States, with SIDS accounting for approximately 37 percent of those deaths (34.7 percent of those deaths result from unknown causes and 28.3 percent result from accidental suffocation or strangulation in bed).
The Tennessee woman was initially being investigated by Child Youth Services because the baby was born with THC in its system at the time of birth.
As a mother, obviously this whole thing is unconscionable. My heart breaks for this innocent child, and I hope investigators are able to either corroborate the woman’s story or find out what really happened to this sweet baby.
The woman faces one count each of concealing the death of a child, abuse of a corpse, obstruction of justice, welfare fraud, and tampering with evidence and is slated to appear before a judge later this month.