Police: Mom bathed, dressed dead kids By BRUCE SMITH, Associated Press Writer

Police: Mom bathed, dressed dead kids By BRUCE SMITH, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 10 minutes ago



HANAHAN, S.C. - Two children found dead under an apartment sink had been bathed and dressed by their mother before being wrapped in trash bags, according to arrest warrants released Wednesday.

ADVERTISEMENT

The warrants provide new details of the events that police say led to the arrest of Sametta Heyward, a single mother suspected of leaving her children in a hot car for hours while she was at work.

Authorities could not immediately determine if the children died in the car as temperatures outside reached 88 degrees, or if they died after being wrapped in the trash bags. Lab tests to determine the exact causes of death were not expected for a couple of weeks.

Heyward, 27, was charged Tuesday with homicide by child abuse after the bodies of 1-year-old Triniti Campbell and 4-year-old Shawn Campbell Jr. were found in her apartment.

The warrants said Heyward called her ex-boyfriend and told him she had "killed her babies."

Heyward, who works with disabled people for a nonprofit agency, had taken her children to work with her about 3 p.m. because her baby sitter plans fell through. According to the warrants, Heyward told relatives that when she returned to her Chevy Cavalier about 11:30 p.m., the children were not responding and had weak pulses.

Before the children were put in the bags, they were bathed. The boy was dressed in a shirt and shorts; the little girl in a sun dress, Hanahan police Lt. Michael Fowler said.

"The medical examiner is trying to nail down did they die of the heat exhaustion in the car or were they possibly technically alive when she put them in the bags," Fowler said.

Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said if the children were alive when wrapped in the bags, they would have been unconscious, because the bags weren't torn or stretched, he said.

"They had to be so weak they couldn't move," he said.

Officers investigating a report of a disturbance at Heyward's apartment on Monday found her crying and yelling, "Oh, my babies," and a man holding her told them about the bodies, according to a police report. She told officers she wanted to die and asked them to kill her, according to the report.

At the scene Monday "most of the officers were young and some of them had to turn away," Fowler said. "You get conditioned to deal pretty much with anything, except when kids are involved. That's the hardest thing."

Heyward was being held at a Berkeley County jail. Her attorney said he didn't know when he would ask for a bail hearing.

Employed by the Disabilities Board of Charleston County, Heyward travels to clients' homes around the county, which runs nearly 100 miles along the coast. It was unclear where she had been working Sunday.

Board spokeswoman Laura Villeponteaux said the nonprofit group is "deeply saddened by the tragedy." She declined to give out any more information, saying the agency was cooperating with police.

Family and neighbors described Heyward as a hard-working single mother who provided for her children. The mother of four put a newborn up for adoption in January, police said, and a 12-year-old son was living with her ex-boyfriend in Maryland.

Heyward has been arrested at least twice in the past three years, according to records from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. However, she was not prosecuted on a hindering an officer charge and found not guilty of first-degree criminal domestic violence in February 2006.

Hanahan is a bedroom community of about 14,000 people about 15 miles from Charleston. The city had two homicides last year, its first in more than five years, Fowler said.

___

Associated Press Writer Seanna Adcox in Columbia contributed to this report.