Mom pleads to murder of infant who died from meth intoxication and was left swaddled in her attic

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Shaylynn Curtis (Christian County Jail)

A 30-year-old woman in Kentucky will spend more than two decades behind bars after pleading to killing her 5-month-old son — who died in 2021 of complications due to ingesting methamphetamine — then hiding his body in the attic for at least a day. Circuit Court Judge Jamus Redd on Monday ordered Shaylynn Curtis to serve a sentence of 23 years in a state correctional facility.

Curtis entered an Alford plea to one count of murder and one count of abuse of a corpse in connection to the infant’s death, authorities confirmed to Law&Crime. Judge Redd sentenced Curtis to 20 years on the murder charge and three years on the abuse of corpse charge, to be served consecutively.

An Alford plea is functionally equivalent to a guilty plea in that it results in a conviction, but it allows a defendant to maintain their claim of innocence while conceding that the state has sufficient evidence to convict them at trial.

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Given the opportunity to speak on her own behalf, Curtis told the court, “I love my son,” according to a report from Princeton, Kentucky news radio station WPKY.

Authorities said that Curtis’ son died on the evening of Oct. 25, 2021.

According to the Kentucky State Police (KSP) Post 1, Curtis was arrested the day after her son died following an incident in which she brought her already-deceased infant to a friend’s house for an unknown reason. After that, she returned to her own residence, placed the baby in swaddling clothes and then put him in the attic of her home on East Adams Mill Road in Trigg County.

Curtis did not make any effort to call 911 or otherwise seek assistance for her son from law enforcement or medical personnel, police said. Curtis’ friends grew concerned for the child’s safety and phoned law enforcement to request a welfare check on behalf of the infant. When police arrived, they located the child’s body in the attic, saying he had been dead for about 24 hours.

State police received the cause and manner of death report in late December last year and presented those results to a grand jury in January. The medical examiner’s report showed that the baby’s cause of death was acute methamphetamine intoxication.

However, the manner of death was listed as “undetermined,” due to the medical examiner being unable to determine how the infant ingested the meth, Commonwealth’s Attorney Carrie Ovey-Wiggins said during Monday’s hearing in audio clips provided by WPKY.

“That’s the reason for the alternative theories alleged in the indictment,” Ovey-Wiggins said. “The grand jury indicted the murder offense as ‘intentional’ or ‘wanton.’ It’s my belief that if the jury didn’t believe that the defendant intentionally gave the child meth for the child to die, than any other conduct would have been wanton and would have constituted murder as well.”

Another possible means of the child ingesting the meth could have been through breastfeeding after Curtis had used meth, Ovey-Wiggins said.

Because she pleaded to a violent felony, state law requires that Curtis serve at least 85% of her sentence, meaning she will be incarcerated for a minimum of 19.5 years.