Foster mom who left 3-year-old twins to die in hot car in Georgia charged with murder and child cruelty
Hinesville, Georgia: A foster mother in Georgia has been charged with second-degree murder and cruelty when her foster twins died after they were left in a hot car.
Claudette Foster was charged two weeks after Payton and Raelynn Keyes died, Hinesville police said. The twins went missing on September 29.
The three-year-old twins were found unresponsive in the backyard in a parked car in Claudette Foster's fiance's house, a PR manager named Witney Morros.
The children died of accidental heatstroke, according to the autopsy report, the police said. The parents had reported the twins missing to the police.
Hinesville police Detective Bryan Wolfe said that Foster's "lack of supervision for the children allowed them to enter the vehicle and pass away" in a statement.
Foster is being held at Liberty County jail without a bond.
The biological mom of the twins said she was heartbroken about what happened. "It's a nightmare. It feels like a giant nightmare. I feel like we were the last ones to know our daughters died," Sky Keyes said in an interview with WTOC.
The last time she saw her kids alive was when they had met with a caseworker. "We got pregnant six months after we lost our first daughter. She died at three weeks. We found out we were pregnant with the twins. They were born 10 weeks early," Keyes said.
She described them as happy kids who could put a smile on anyone's face. "They’re little prissy tomboys, put it that way. They tagged around with their brother, but they are as girly as you can get at the same time, but happy-go-lucky kids and attached to Mom and Dad, but they just... they were just perfect," she said.
The police found the kids after a second search of the backyard. They had been under Foster's care along with two other children for approximately a year and a half.