Louisiana mom, 24, takes dead 5-year-old daughter to hospital with broken neck after 'car crash', gets arrested for murder
ALEXANDRIA, LOUISIANA: After a mother brought her dead 5-year-old daughter to the hospital, claiming that the latter sustained fatal neck injuries in a car crash, she was charged with second-degree murder.
On July 17, Jasmine Anderson, 24, rushed her daughter Audrey Lynn Chelette to the emergency room of a local hospital, claiming that both of them had been in a vehicular collision that left her daughter fighting for life. Chelette was declared dead on arrival. Anderson was arrested Tuesday and booked into the Rapides Parish Detention Center, where records showed she had spent time back in 2014 and 2015, NBC News reported.
While an autopsy did confirm that Audrey died of a neck injury, "the injury... did not seem consistent with what would occur during a crash," the Alexandria Police Department said in a statement. In addition, the investigators who responded to the hospital spent an entire day trying to determine the site of the crash, as described by Anderson but failed to find it. When they did manage to locate it the next day, the police concluded that there was not enough evidence to conclude that a car crash had taken place at the site.
Further investigation found that both Audrey's father, Christopher Dawayne Chelette, as well as her younger brother, Christopher Dawayne Chelette Jr., had met with unnatural deaths in the past. According to police records, Chelette Sr. hanged himself to death at the age of 20 back in 2016, while Chelette Jr. died at the age of four in April after having a bottle cap stuck in his throat. On both occasions, Anderson was the one who discovered their bodies.
"Naturally, we are taking another look at our files from these deaths," Alexandria Police Department Cpl. Wade Bourgeois said. "However, it would be premature to say we are reopening the cases."
Anderson has been inactive on her Twitter page since 2014. However, for around a year before that, she shared a number of pictures of Audrey, one "from even before she was born."
Christopher Dawayne Chelette's mother, Kendra Foster, said that upon her arrival at the hospital, she was told by the doctors that her granddaughter had a four-inch slit on her throat but no other marks on her body from the alleged crash. "She [Anderson] was with them in their dying moments — all three of them — and none of them lived," Foster said.
She said that she did not suspect Anderson of any wrongdoing till Audrey's mysterious death. "I don’t want revenge. I just want her to deal with what she’s done," Foster said.
It was also reported that a number of family members, including Anderson's mother and grandmother, suspected that the accused physically abused her children. On more than one occasion the Louisiana Department of Children & Family Services had to be called to address the suspicions. "The system failed my babies," Foster said. "I do not understand why the system failed these children so bad."