The mother was in shock that day in May 2018 as several law enforcement officers, some in tactical gear, stood outside the rural Winnemucca home to serve a search warrant.

“I had a miscarriage, OK? A miscarriage. Why are you guys here over a f**king miscarriage?” Rousseau responded to the deputy.

The single mother, who was already struggling to afford care for her two young boys, was dealing with complicated feelings of ambivalence and guilt about her unplanned pregnancy and stillbirth, her attorney said. Rousseau told the deputies she had been taking large quantities of cinnamon and lifting heavy things while pregnant “to have a miscarriage.”

Deputies walked to a cross that was painted red with Abel’s name written in black on a green plot behind the house, according to the police body camera footage and a police report. They dug up the remains and carried them to a law enforcement vehicle, the report said.

Two days later, Rousseau was arrested and charged with felony manslaughter before she was convicted in Nevada, where abortion is legal, under what legal experts say is a vague and broadly written statute that makes it a crime for any woman to take drugs with the intent to terminate a pregnancy. She was also charged with concealing birth, a misdemeanor, but was not convicted on that charge.

  • velma@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
    19·
    6 days ago

    Deputy Mitcham was a familiar face to Rousseau when officers showed up at her doorstep to serve a search warrant because a woman who sometimes babysat her children was a friend of Mitcham’s, according to Fitzsimmons.

    In the police report, Mitcham wrote that the woman sent her a screenshot of Rousseau’s Facebook post, which prompted her to check medical records without finding anything “indicating a pregnancy nor any OB/GYN visits.”

    At the 2021 hearing, Mitcham testified she was “sad for Patience” because she felt the mother “didn’t have many options. She didn’t have a lot of help.” Mitcham explained she had a 1-year-old child at home and the case “really hit me hard,” adding: “It still hurts me. Haunts me.”

    After she was released from prison, Rousseau repeatedly asked where Abel’s remains were being held, and Fitzsimmons told her they were still in custody and they would retrieve them once the case was dismissed, the attorney said.

    But it wasn’t until a Washington Post reporter, Caroline Kitchener, went to Mitcham’s home in 2023 to interview her for a story about Rousseau’s case that the mother and her lawyer found out what happened to the remains, Fitzsimmons said.

    Mitcham told the reporter she claimed the remains of Abel from a Nevada funeral home and recounted how she told the funeral director: “I’m taking him. That’s my baby,” according to the Washington Post report.

    The cop stole the remains from her as well.

      • velma@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
        131·
        6 days ago

        Yeah this story is insane and it’s driving me wild that no one has actually read the crazy details, but they’re getting more hung up on whether this woman lied about her work history.

        She’s not the only woman to be treated this way either.

        • RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world
          21·
          6 days ago

          I don’t understand, then, why you keep pretending that was accusing her of lying when you’ve been told multiple times it was about the bad journalism.

          • velma@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
            21·
            6 days ago

            The fact that those men decided to only talk about that one small detail in this entire fucked up story says more than anything.

            Not even a passing comment about how terrible this would have been for her to endure. No sympathy, nothing.

            Just speculation about how she couldn’t possibly have started working until later than she claimed.