Inset: Police at the home of Melissa Beisel investigating her son’s death. Background: The California home where Melissa Beisel allegedly murdered her 2-year-old (KNBC/YouTube).
A California mother is charged with “murdering her toddler” after she staged the boy‘s death to look like an accidental drowning during a bath, prosecutors say.
Melissa Beisel, 41, of Fresno, went so far as to harm herself with a “sharp object” to make it look like she felt bad about not seeing the boy drown or being able to revive him, according to the Placentia police and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
“The case was initially investigated as an alleged drowning,” the DA’s office says in a press release announcing Beisel’s murder charge. The Placentia Police Department even described it as such after responding to the scene.
“The investigation revealed that the mother was giving the child a bath in a walk-in shower, using a plastic storage bin,” the department said in a September press release. “The mother walked out of the bathroom to obtain some soap and left the child alone for approximately 2 minutes. When the mother returned, she found the child face down in the bin, unresponsive.”
According to the Placentia Police Department (PPD) release, Beisel “began CPR on the child and when it was not effective, the mother harmed herself with a sharp object.” She then stayed in the bathroom with her son, Aidan, for approximately six hours before she was found by the boy’s father, who called 911 “after finding her in the shower with their dead son.”
Based on the initial investigation and interviews, Beisel was originally taken into custody after being discharged from the hospital for involuntary manslaughter and child abuse causing great bodily injury. She was arrested on June 4 and charged with murder after a “subsequent investigation ruled out drowning as the cause of death for the otherwise healthy 2-year-old and determined the manner of death to be homicide,” according to the DA’s office.
“A mother is a child’s first protector,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer in a statement. “For a mother to use the very arms that are meant to shield her child from harm to instead physically extinguish the life of a child she created is a depravity which we will never be able to fully comprehend.”
Beisel is being held in Madera County without bail. She is scheduled to be arraigned on June 30 in Fullerton.
