Alyssa Wehmeyer, Cape Giradeau, Missouri mother charged with 1 year old baby’s death after child who had been subjected to ongoing neglect and malnutrition was last fed 43 hours earlier with mom blaming migraine headache.
A Missouri mother has blamed a migraine headache for not feeding her 1 year old baby for nearly two days leading to the toddler’s ‘malnutrition’ death.
Alyssa N. Wehmeyer, 21, of Cape Giradeau, upon her arrest on Monday, March 4, was charged with felony abuse or neglect of a child resulting in death according to a Missouri State Highway Patrol news release.
The arrest came the day after the Cape Girardeau Police Department requested that the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime ‘investigate a suspicious death’ of a toddler.
An arrest warrant filed in Cape Giradeau County stated Wehmeyer not having fed her baby ‘for approximately 43 hours,’ causing the infant severe malnutrition and neglect and ultimately death.
A probable cause stated Wehmeyer’s infant dying 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.
The mother told investigators she’d last fed the baby on February 26 around 5 or 6 p.m., when she changed the baby’s diaper and put the infant to sleep in a crib. She also mentioned that she’d put them to sleep the following night at around 6:30 p.m. after changing their diaper. By then, it had been approximately 24 hours since the child had last eaten, with the mother saying she had left the baby unattended in its crib for 19 hours.
According to documents the mother stated the baby waking up crying circa 2am during the early morning hours of Feb 28th, with Wehmeyer saying she held the infant for 30-40 minutes before putting the child back to bed and returning to sleep herself. Wehmeyer stated not checking on the baby again until about 1pm. some 11 hours later only to find that the baby’s ‘lips were blue’ and the child wasn’t breathing.
Which is to wonder, wasn’t this what the mother had been planning all along? Or should she have at least known that this was the inevitable result of her ongoing lack of care?
Investigators also noted that the baby had severe blisters attributable from 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,’ the probable cause stated.
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.
Not immediately clear was whether the mother was still breast-feeding the child or had been administering baby formula.
The whereabouts of the 1 year old’s father was not immediately known.
Wehmeyer was slated to make her first court appearance on Thursday, March 6.
