Horror Hits Town of 200 People When 6-Year-Old Is Found Dead in Chilling Location
Officers with the Arkansas state police arrested a 28-year-old woman and her boyfriend Friday after discovering her 6-year-old son’s corpse within their home in Moro, west of Marianna.
Police found the body buried beneath the floorboards in a hallway inside the eastern Arkansas home Friday evening, according to a state police news release.
Subsequently, deputies with the sheriff’s office called special agents of the Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division to examine the scene at around 10:45 p.m.
According to state police, preliminary findings suggest the boy had succumbed to injuries he had received three months earlier. The circumstances surrounding his death and its causes remain under investigation.
Police also found a 6-year-old girl living at the same house with what is believed to be burns to the scalp. Officers are investigating the injuries the girl had received.
She has been taken to a hospital in Memphis, where she is reported to be in stable condition, according to police.
Police arrested the boy’s mother, Ashley Roland, and her 33-year-old boyfriend, Nathan Bridges. They are charged with capital murder, abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence and endangering the welfare of a minor.
Roland and Bridges are currently held at the Lee County Jail, police said.
“This is a small, quiet town. Nothing, nothing like this has happened around here,” said Glenda Farrell, a next-door neighbor, according to WPDE-TV.
“Sometimes you’d see kids outside playing, but they really kept to themselves. You’d see them coming and going, but really, nothing to be concerning that would make you think anything of that magnitude was going on,” Farrell said of her neighbors.
“It’s devastating. Because I mean it’s out of nowhere. I mean right here in Christmas time? It’s surreal,” she said, according to WEAU.
“I have a lot of questions. A lot of questions,” another neighbor said, according to the news station.
According to a GoFundMe fundraiser set up by a woman, who identified herself as a friend of the children’s grandmother, the children’s grandmother fought for custody of her now-deceased grandchild for nearly a year, eventually getting a court order to visit the children every weekend a week ago.
When she had visited Roland’s home to see the kids on Friday, she was told the youngest child, the boy, was at a friend’s home, while the oldest, the girl, couldn’t walk.
The grandmother subsequently took the girl to the hospital, wrote Anita Widby, the GoFundMe page’s manager.
“I saw her…this child’s hair had been chopped off, she is malnourished, cracked ribs, and many many burns on her body in various stages of healing,” Widby wrote.
“These injuries are presumed to be from her [mother] and the mother’s boyfriend,” she added.
Later that day, Karen, the children’s grandmother, was informed her grandson had died and his body was discovered at the house.
According to the New York Post, Karen’s visit to the house might have led to cops eventually discovering the boy’s body.
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