OVEN-SLAY TOT MOM’S HEARTACHE
Also shocked grandma accused
The mother of a Mississippi toddler found dead in a heated oven says her daughter’s death is “the hardest thing” she’s ever dealt with – and that she’s still grappling with the fact that her mother has been charged in the girl’s murder.
Royalty Floyd, 20 months, died Monday after she was found stabbed and baked in an oven by police and sheriff’s deputies in Shaw, Miss.
“Royalty Marie Floyd was the best thing that ever happened to me. She’s my one and only daughter. My first love. The hardest thing that I have ever had to go through in my life,” her mother Veronica Jones wrote on Facebook this week.
“My heart has been ripped from my chest… To my daughter Royalty ‘Mommy will always love you and you will live in our hearts forever.’ ”
Royalty’s grandmother, Carolyn Jones, 48, was taken into custody shortly after the tot’s death, and was charged with first-degree murder Tuesday. Her bail is set at $500,000.
But Veronica Jones wrote that her mother’s actions don’t reflect the woman she knows.
“I’m being told that my mother stabbed my daughter and baked her in the oven, but my mother loved my daughter,” she wrote. “She always treated Royalty like Royalty and everybody that knows us know that.” Jones also shared a link to a GoFundMe page in order to cover Royalty’s funeral arrangements.
Officials said the toddler was living with Carolyn Jones while Veronica lived elsewhere.
Carolyn’s brother was the one who found Royalty’s body and called police Monday.
Bolivar County Sheriff Kelvin Williams Sr. said the grisly crime was one of the worst he’d seen in nearly 30 years on the job.
“This is one of the most horrible things I’ve seen in doing law enforcement,” he said. “The hardest part … is to see a child victim.”
Royalty’s body was sent to the state crime lab for an autopsy to determine whether she died before or after she was placed in the oven.