The sentencing in the death of 1-year-old Oaklee Snow has been handed down by Indiana courts.
As Fox59 reported Friday, Madison Marshall, Oaklee’s mother, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Marshall accepted a plea deal requiring her to testify against Roan Waters and plead guilty to neglect of a dependent resulting in death.
Waters, Marshall’s boyfriend at the time of Oaklee’s death, received a 45-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to neglect of a dependent resulting in death and two additional counts of neglect.
As previously reported by CrimeOnline, Marshall and Waters were accused of abducting Oaklee and her infant brother from their father’s home in Oklahoma on January 19, 2023. The pair traveled to Indiana, where Waters has family, and abandoned the baby boy at a drug house in Indianapolis.
Waters’ family found the infant boy and reported the case to the Department of Child Services, but Oaklee’s whereabouts remained unknown until April, after Marshall was arrested in North Carolina. Once extradited to Indiana, she reportedly led investigators to an abandoned house in Morgan County, where the girl’s badly decomposed body was found in a dresser drawer.
Court documents state Oaklee died on February 9, 2023, after she woke her mother and Waters by crying because she was hungry. Marshall said Waters threw the girl on the floor and shouted at her. Later, she said, Waters called for her, and she found him holding Oaklee as the girl struggled to breathe. Marshall said she tried to call 911, but Waters slapped the phone from her hand.
She said he then wrapped Oaklee in a blanket, and the couple left the drug house, driving to the abandoned house where Waters left the body.
“The fact that two adults who had the care of this child would let these things happen to her and do these things to her is just terrifying. And that’s why they’re going to the Department of Corrections,” Dan Chicchini, chief trial deputy at the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, said following the sentencing.
“That’s why that 45-year number is important; it’s because it is as serious a crime as it gets. They were entrusted with the care of a 2-year-old baby and failed miserably, and it resulted in her death.”
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[Feature Photo: Oaklee Snow/Facebook]
