State investigators in Oklahoma are investigating alleged misconduct involving a jailer at the Caddo County Jail and a woman charged with the death of 4-year-old Athena Brownfield.
Brownfield was reported missing on January 10, 2023, after a mail carrier found her 5-year-old sister wandering alone outside the home of Ivon and Alisia Adams, their caregivers, in Cyril. They were ultimately arrested, Alysia in Oklahoma and Ivon in Arizona, as CrimeOnline reported.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation told KOCO that the Caddo County Sheriff’s Office, where Alysia Adams was being held, requested the investigation into a possible alleged romantic relationship between a detention officer and Adams. Caddo County Sheriff Spencer Davis said that the jailer was fired.
Details about the relationship were not revealed, except to say that the revelations came during the first week of December.
That was shortly before prosecutors upgraded charges against Alysia Adams to first degree murder and downgraded the charges against her husband to second degree murder.
When she was arrested last year, Alysia Adams told investigators that Ivon Adams beat Athena to death on Christmas Day 2022 and then took her body and buried it on property he once owned, where the little girl’s remains were found on January 17, 2023.
Both caregivers were charged with child neglect, and Ivon Adams was also charged with first degree murder at that time. But the charges against Alysia Adams were upgraded and Ivon Adams’s downgraded after an autopsy on the girl’s body revealed that she died not from a beating but from “acute pneumonia complicating malnutrition,” KOKH reported.
The medical examiner’s report said that Brownfield was far below standards in weight for her size and age at the time of death. Additionally, her body was found stuffed into a backpack and buried in a shallow grave — and the backpack, with the little girl’s body in it, weighted just 23 pounds.
Prosecutors said at Alysia Adams’s arraignment in December that she was charged with first degree murder for “putting Athena Brownfield in a closet and depriving the child of proper nutrition.”
For the latest true crime and justice news, subscribe to the ‘Crime Stories with Nancy Grace’ podcast.
[Featured image: Athena Brownfield, left/police handout and Alysia Adams/Caddo County Sheriff’s Office]
