When US police officer Billy Simpson found Kimberly Lightwine on August 29, she was lying facedown in the grass less than a metre from her Ford Expedition, which had come to rest in the middle of a Missouri field. The police discovered Lightwine lying face down in the field, located east of Morrisville, Missouri, only clad in her panties. According to KYTV, the mother was spotted waving her arms to get somebody’s attention. Lightwine was taken to the hospital for a reported leg injury, where she remains.
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Polk County sheriff’s deputies and Missouri State Highway Patrol troopers looked for Lightwine and Anderson after her sister, who lives in Tennessee, told Bolivar police on August 28 that she couldn’t reach them and feared for the safety of her sister and her nephew, who had physical and mental health problems. She said “she and God brought her baby into this world and that she had to help God take him out”, Simpson wrote in a probable cause statement provided by the Bolivar Herald-Free Press.
Officer Billy Simpson was the first to find the pair.
“I’m a awful mother, I got high, and I got depressed, and I think I am going to throw up”, she told investigators according to the statement.
Lightwine has been charged with second-degree murder and second-degree elder abuse, which relates to disabled adults over 18 who are unable to protect themselves. Investigators believe Anderson, who was incapable of tending to himself and was described by his father as having the cognitive abilities of an elementary school student, may have died as many as three days earlier from dehydration and the lack of hydrocortisone for an adrenal gland issue.
Austin’s father confirmed the boy was blind, autistic, had limited vocabulary and was unable to walk far.
His unnamed father told police that Anderson required hydrocortisone medication.
Lightwine said she remembered him falling to the ground but didn’t know what happened next. I got high, and I got depressed, and I think I am going to throw up, ‘ according to the probable cause statement. “He cried for me”, she told police, according to the statement. When the police found Lightwine, the mom of the teen had a broken leg, which was perhaps part of the reason she was still in the field with her dead son. “I try to block it out”.
The summer sun beat unrelentingly down on the field, but the two had no water, no food, no medication. He recalled an incident in which Anderson kicked Lightwine and she reacted violently by grabbing him and cussing at him.
“This is a insane f-ed up world that I chose to live, and I killed my kid”, she said again.
Each time, she would shove the blind, handicapped teenager away from her, and say, “No, you don’t want to love me. Please let God take you”.
Lightwine is now in a hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Lightwine is being held on $250,000 bond.
Prosecutors in Polk County, Missouri, have charged the boy’s mother with both second-degree murder and second-degree elder abuse.
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Saloga said the Polk County Sheriff’s Office has been dismissive of her attempts to give information, and she has been frustrated by all of the people making disparaging comments online about her sister.
