Pregnant Woman Arrested After 2nd Baby Dies In Her Care

Screen-Shot-2014-02-13-at-10.43.34-PM-240x300

A pregnant Florida woman who has had two of her children die in her care was arrested Tuesday after she told cops she buried her 2-year-old girl in a Crescent City yard.

Rachel Fryer, 32, has not been charged with murdering little Tariji Gordon, but the mother was accused by her oldest child, a 7-year-old girl, of regularly beating Tariji with flip-flops, a stick, a mop and a broom handle, authorities say. Cops already suspect Fryer beat her children after finding a text message from late last month indicating she’d beaten one the youngsters with a hanger, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

“I can’t take it no more my child is retarded. … I don’t know what else to do. … It’s every day all day,” the text message read. “I need my depression medicine ASAP this is too much I’m about to lose it.”

Tariji’s twin brother, Tavont’ae Gordon, died when the two were 2 months old in 2011. Fryer faces a charge of aggravated child neglect and is held in lieu of nearly $1 million in bond. The manic mom told authorities she woke up Thursday to find Tariji unresponsive. Rather than call the cops, she performed CPR and gave the girl asthma medication, but the baby took a breath or two and died.

Fryer loaded the dead baby into a suitcase at her Sanford home and called a friend for a ride. She took the body to a vacant Crescent City home, about 50 miles north, and buried her in a shallow grave.

On Monday, Fryer packed up her things and turned herself in to the Sanford police department, confessing that the child had died. She told investigators where to find little Tariji and officers, once on scene, found a child’s shoe sticking out of the dirt.
An autopsy will be performed to determine how the child died. It wasn’t the first time Fryer had trouble with her children—or let one of them die on her watch.

In 2011, Tariji’s twin brother Tavont’ae Gordon, was found dead at the woman’s home. The death was declared a “co-sleeping” death: an accident in which Fryer rolled on top on the 2-month-old baby in her sleep and suffocated him, the Sentinel reported.

She tested positive for cocaine at the time and the Department of Children and Families took her remaining four children.
Fryer worked to get the children back and they were returned in November. A caseworker even visited the family on Thursday, the day Tariji died. The worker noted that the child was missing that day. “All she was thinking was they’re going to take my kids, I just got my kids back,” Aja Lytle, the woman’s sister-in-law, told WFTV. “She fought 2 years to get her kids back.”

The three remaining children are back in the foster care system. Fryer has several past arrests. A friend told the Sentinel she is pregnant again and is about four or five months along.

Cops are also searching for the woman’s boyfriend, Tim Gordon.