arrest of a Texan woman making her daughter live with the body of her father

The mother was arrested and imprisoned for child endangerment, tampering with evidence and non-declaration of death

A woman was arrested in a small North Texas town on Tuesday after police discovered she had been forcing her 11-year-old daughter to live with her father’s body for several weeks, local media reported this week. Susan Que Smith explained to the police that she had not declared the death of Allen Wiest, the father of her daughter, for fear of being evicted from his accommodation where the man was not supposed to be.

The mother and her daughter had been living with this decomposing body for three or four weeks, in the town of Electra, in the middle of the oil fields.

On December 1, the local police chief, Terry Wooten, had visited the scene after being informed of the presence of flies and odors coming from an open window of the apartment. Having received no response after knocking on her door, her team had entered Susan Que Smith’s apartment and discovered, in the hallway, the corpse covered with a blanket and garbage bags.

Without running water, the apartment was littered with rubbish and was deemed “unlivable”, according to the police report. Susan Que Smith told the police that the body was that of the child’s father.

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