A Louisiana prosecutor wants to prosecute parents for murder after their adult daughter dies, found living in isolation at home. Please note that some details may shock.
When Lacey Ellen Fletcher was found dead, she was lying on a sofa that she looked like she hadn’t moved in years, her body stuck in a hole in the sofa. This week, a Louisiana prosecutor announced that he wanted to charge his parents with murder. The 36-year-old woman was indeed living at home, reclusive and visibly abandoned. District authorities in East Feliciana Parish told NOLA.com that she had severe sores on her stomach and crushed feces on her face, abdomen and chest. Her hair was matted and full of maggots.
According to the prosecutor, the wounds of the 30-year-old “seemed to have rotted to the bone”. The medical examiner said Lacey Ellen Fletcher died of homicide, explaining that her condition was linked to a “state of chronic neglect”. She weighed just 43 kilos at the time of her death and was otherwise covid-19 positive.
“Extreme cruelty”
The parents – 64-year-old former councilor Sheila Fletcher and Clay Fletcher – said in questioning about two weeks after their daughter’s death that she had autism and “some degree of down syndrome.” ‘Asperger’, but that she was ‘sane enough to make her own decisions’ until her death. “The question on everyone’s mind is how people who were supposed to take care of her, in the house, could have let her end up in a state like this,” explained the prosecutor. “It’s cruelty to the crippled. We can’t just let this pass.”
Her parents explained that she had been in school for a while before finishing her studies at home, because she suffered from extreme anxiety as a teenager. She was then followed by a psychologist. According to them, their daughter had moved into the living room and had refused to move since. So they brought her food for her to eat and had a potty set up for her to do her business. But she would have refused to use it, preferring to make a hole in the sofa to relieve herself. “They left her on this sofa, where she was urinating on it,” lamented the prosecutor. The couple would have in the past tried to have her treated in a special establishment, but she would have categorically refused. They added that their daughter had never complained about the injuries she had on her body and that her mother bathed her regularly. It was one night that Lacey Ellen Fletcher finally lost her life, as her mother slept on a chair next to her.