A woman from Missouri reportedly kept her autistic son in a field for days without food, water or medication until he died.
Kimberley Lightwine told police that she killed her 19-year-old son Austin Anderson after the two were found in a field on August 29. Police found the mother lying face down wearing only her underwear, while her son’s lifeless body was found just a few metres away.
Lightwine, 42, told Polk County detective Billy Simpson that she didn’t know how she got to the field but that she had been using methamphetamine beforehand, reports TIME.
“I’m a terrible mother. I got high and I got depressed and I think I am going to throw up,” Lightwine said, according to her police statement, reports the Bolivar Herald-Free Press. “I killed my kid, I killed my kid, I killed my kid, I killed my kid.”
“I don’t know how many days, I don’t know how long he’d been on the ground. He cried for me,” she told police, according to the statement. “I just blocked it out. I just kept thinking that God or somebody came and got him and took him where he needed to be.”
The statement also confirmed that Anderson was autistic and blind and he “required certain medications for his medical conditions/disabilities.”
The boy’s father, added that if he “did not take the hydrocortisone medication, he would go into a coma and die.”
An autopsy showed that Anderson’s brain was swollen from dehydration and shock from the lack of medication.
Lightwine has been charged with second-degree murder and second-degree elder abuse because of her son’s disability.
