An Oklahoma toddler whose body was found stuffed in a dresser drawer in an abandoned Indiana house died of “unspecified means,” a county coroner said this week.
The Morgan County Coroner’s Office classified the death of Oaklee Snow, who died just shy of her second birthday earlier this year, as a homicide, the Indianapolis Star reported.
The coroner did not release other specifics from the autopsy.
The littler girl’s mother, Madison Marshall, and her boyfriend, Roan Waters, are accused of abducting Oaklee and her infant brother from their father’s home in Oklahoma on January 19, as CrimeOnline reported. The pair traveled to Indiana, where Waters has family, and abandoned the baby boy at a drug house in Indianapolis.
Waters’ family found the boy there and reported the case to the Department of Child Services, but Oaklee’s whereabouts were not established until April, after Marshall was arrested in North Carolina. Once she was extradited to Indiana, she reportedly led investigators to the abandoned house in Morgan County, where the girl’s badly decomposed body was found in a dresser drawer.
Investigators positively identified the remains a month later.
Court documents say Oaklee died on February 9 after the little girl woke her mother and Waters crying because she was hungry. Marshall said Waters threw the girl on the floor and shouted at her. Later, she said, Waters called for her, and she found her boyfriend holding Oaklee as she struggled to breathe. She said she tried to call 911, but Waters slapped the phone out of her hand.
Then, she said, he wrapped Oaklee in a blanket, and the couple left the drug house, driving to the abandoned house where Waters left the body.
Waters had been arrested in Colorado on March 3 on outstanding warrants for child abuse, domestic assault, and battery in the presence of a minor in Oklahoma. Those charges related to past abuse of Oaklee. Marshall was arrested three weeks later in North Carolina, on charges of neglect and assisting a criminal.
The pair’s charges have since been upgraded. Marshall, whose trial is set to begin on July 10, faces two counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in death, neglect of a dependent resulting in serious injury, assisting a criminal in murder, two counts of neglect of a dependent-endangerment, and neglect of a dependent-abandonment, according to WBIW.
Waters has been charged with murder, two counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in death, neglect of a dependent resulting in serious injury, battery of a person under 14 resulting in injury, and three counts of neglect of a dependent. His trial is scheduled to begin on October 2.
The baby boy has been returned to his father in Oklahoma.
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[Featured image: Oaklee Snow/Facebook]
