A woman accused of secretly killing her newborn daughter in 2017 allegedly celebrated her slimmed down figure shortly after burying the baby’s remains.
Prosecutors told an Ohio court last week that Brooke Skylar Richardson, 20, texted her mother only hours after committing the deed, the Dayton Daily News reported.
“I am literally speechless with how happy I am my belly is back OMG,” the text read.
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Richardson’s attorneys claim that the then-18-year-old high school cheerleader delivered a stillborn baby and, not knowing what else to do, buried the child in the backyard.
The doctor who performed the autopsy on Richardson’s baby testified before a Warren County court on Friday that she believes the cause of death was “homicidal violence.”
Prosecutors appearing in a Warren County court said Richardson deliberately killed the child before burning her and burying her to hide the evidence, Fox 19 reported. They said doctors told Richardson she was pregnant in April 2017 and revealed she would give birth in only a few weeks.
“Upon learning she was pregnant Brooke burst into tears and told her doctor she could not have this child and she could not tell anyone about being pregnant. And Brooke told no one,” said Assistant Warren County Prosecutor Julie Kraft.
“The state expects the evidence to show on May 7, 2017, Brooke gave birth to her daughter in the middle of the night, and upon realizing she was going into labor, she still told no one. She did not tell her parents who were asleep downstairs in the same house, or her brother who was across the hall, rather, Brook took her own daughter’s life, destroyed all evidence of her birth, and buried her in the backyard. For over two months, in the summer of 2017, the body of Brooke’s daughter decomposed in her backyard,” Kraft added.
When Richardson returned to Hilltop OBGYN in July of 2017 a different physician confronted her about her no longer being pregnant, Kraft said. That’s when she allegedly admitted to the doctor that “she’d had the baby in the middle of the night and buried her in the backyard.”
Her OB-GYN then alerted law enforcement. Police interviewed Richardson, who claimed she “didn’t kill” her daughter and that she “never meant to hurt her.”
It wasn’t alive,” she said in response to officers’ questions about abortions and placentas.
Authorities eventually found the child’s remains in the backyard of Richardson’s home. Once the baby’s bones were reconstructed, a forensic pathologist observed that the end parts were darker than the rest of the bones.
Did Brooke Skylar Richardson burn her child?
One of the central questions surrounding the case is whether Richardson burned her child.
Although she’d previously denied burning the child several time, following one police interview in 2017, Richardson said, “I tried to cremate the baby.”
In one police report described in court, a detective said Richardson lit her baby’s foot on fire with a lighter and extinguished the flames after they spread to the child’s chest, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Charlie H. Rittgers, her attorney, described the allegation as “silly.” According to him, his client had already been broken by police looking to obtain a confession.
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Richardson is facing aggravated murder and involuntary manslaughter charges.
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