A Missouri mother was charged this week in the death of a her 1-year-old child who “suffered from severe malnutrition and neglect.”
An arrest warrant filed in Cape Giradeau County says that Alyssa N. Wehmeyer, 21, didn’t feed her baby “for approximately 43 hours,” causing the infant serious injury and ultimately death.
Wehmeyer was charged with endangering the welfare of a child resulting in death. According to a probable cause statement, Cape Girardeau Police requested the assistance of the Missouri State Highway Patrol after Wehmeyer’s infant died on February 28. An autopsy assigned the cause of death to dehydration and said “very little evidence” was found of food in the baby’s stomach.
Highway patrol investigators met with Wehmeyer who told them she last fed her baby on February 26 around 5 or 6 p.m., when she changed the baby’s diaper and put the infant to bed. The baby woke up crying a few hours later, and she held the infant for a while before putting them back to bed and went back to bed herself. She didn’t check on the baby again until about 1 a.m. on February 28, when she noted the baby’s “lips were blue” and the child wasn’t breathing.
Investigators also noted that the baby had severe diaper rash.
“Wehmeyer informed us that she should have taken [the baby] to the doctor on the 27th and should have changed [the] diaper more regularly, but she had a migraine.”
Wehmeyer was ordered held on a $100,000 bond with restrictions that included no contact with witnesses, no firearms, and no controlled substances without a prescription.
