Woman to serve 40 years in infant’s death
A Houston-area woman has pleaded guilty to suffocating her baby in an “unusual” case that started in 2016 with a suspicious internet post, the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday.
Rosemary Paige Harrah, 23, was initially charged with capital murder in her 2-month-old boy’s death in 2016. She agreed last week to serve a 40-year prison sentence on a lesser murder charge, the district attorney’s office said. She will have to serve half of her sentence before she’s eligible for parole.
The boy, Lucian Angst, was found unresponsive Dec. 11, 2016, at Harrah’s home near Needville. She told paramedics that she fed her baby the night before and went to bed. However, investigators later learned that she wrote a post on Glow Nurture, a social media site for new mothers, saying she was thinking of hurting her baby.
“That’s what clued the investigator to the fact that this was not a natural death,” prosecutor Terese Buess told the Houston Chronicle, adding that the child did not show obvious signs of trauma.
Harrah’s court-appointed defense attorney, Don Hecker, declined to comment on the guilty plea.
Investigators first became aware of the internet post 10 days after the death through an anonymous tip. The tipster told the Needville Police Department that someone using the name “shimmering” talked about hurting the child, and that other users advised her to seek counseling or consider giving up the child for adoption.
The post included the name of Harrah’s child, and detectives with the Fort Bend County Sheriff ’s Office followed up with Harrah. She confirmed that she posted on the website. She also confessed to suffocating the baby by holding a blanket over his face until he stopped moving.
She told the detective that she put the baby back in his bed and didn’t check on him until the next morning. The Galveston County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that the cause of death was suffocation.
A news release from the district attorney’s office called the case “unusual and tragic.”
“It’s not very common for us to see many types of killings of young children, like in this case,” said prosecutor Melissa Munoz. “The other aspect was the internet aspect. Most of this came down to retrieving information off social media sites and other websites to try to get all of her postings and communication with other individuals to try to piece this together.”