Toddler Stabbed, Stuffed In Heated Oven, Grandmother Charged With Murder

After a 20-month-old girl’s body was found in an oven, the victim’s grandmother was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on Tuesday. The woman reportedly stabbed the baby, stuffed into an oven and baked her.

Carolyn Jones, 48, lived with 20-month-old Royalty Marie Floyd in a home on Martin Luther King Drive in Shaw, Mississippi. Police responded to the house Monday along with Bolivar County Sheriff’s Department for assistance at around 7 p.m. local time (8 p.m. EDT).

Bolivar County Sheriff Kelvin Williams Sr. said the heinousness of the crime had rattled him.

“I’ve been in law enforcement a long time, 26 years almost. I’ve been from St. Louis to here and some of the most horrific scenes that I’ve seen in law enforcement involve children," Williams said, Charlotte Observer reported. “We see a lot but when you run across and have incidents that involve children it has an effect on you and doing our job.”

The body was discovered by Jones’s brother who called the police. Williams said there was no one else other than the murder suspect in the house with the victim when the incident took place.

As for the suspect’s motive behind the crime, the authorities said they are yet to find out. "That's hard to say," Williams said. "We don't know."

Although preliminary reports from the crime scene suggested that the toddler was stabbed to death before being put inside a heated oven and baked, the police said it was too early to confirm.

The victim’s body was sent for autopsy and Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain said the authorities were waiting on the state pathologist’s report to confirm whether the victim was dead before she was put inside the oven.

The neighbors around said that they were shocked to hear about the incident.

“It’s a baby. It’s an innocent child. She didn’t ask to be here. I mean, if they didn’t want her why keep her?” Tomorow Williams, one of the neighbors, said, CBS and ABC-affiliated WLOX reported.

Another unnamed neighbor said they hardly see anyone coming in or out of the victim’s house. “I didn’t even know nobody was living in the house. That’s what’s really hurting me and shocked me,” the neighbor said.

A third neighbor told Fox 13 Memphis that apart from Jones and Floyd, Floyd’s mother and an uncle also lived in the house. “They came off as nice people… They always kept to themselves, never bothered nobody. And that’s why it was so unreal when it happened last night,” said the neighbor.

Veronica Jones, the mother of 20-month-old, created a GoFundMe account for her daughter’s funeral. She defended her mother despite the latter being arrested for allegedly killing her daughter.

“All I know is that my mother stabbed my daughter and put her in the oven and cooked her. My mother was not a violent person. She loved Royalty and she always treated Royalty like Royalty. My mom obviously was not herself,” she said.

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the State Crime Lab have joined the investigation. Jones is being held on a $500,000 bond.