Mother Charged With Fatally Smothering Infant Son in St. Louis Park

A Farmington woman accused of fatally smothering her 3-month-old son in 2009 in St. Louis Park—and of trying to suffocate her infant daughter with a blanket last May—was motivated by Munchausen by Proxy, a mental illness that causes parents to seek attention by harming their children, prosecutors claimed in a criminal complaint filed earlier this week.

Ashleigh Jennifer Casey, 25, is in Hennepin County Jail, charged with second-degree murder for the death of her son, Alexander Casey, four years ago, and with two counts of felony assault for attempting to strangle her daughter.

In 2009, St. Louis Park police officers had found the circumstances surrounding Alexander’s death suspicious. When officers asked questions of Ashleigh Casey, she “had a flat affect” and kept checking her phone for text messages. Her son had stopped breathing a few weeks earlier and had been resuscitated by her grandmother, a registered nurse. Plus, the boy had been hospitalized twice in the past week: once for bowel surgery, once because he was “crying and fussing all day.”

But a medical examination and an autopsy found no reason why the boy should have stopped breathing, and police were forced to end the investigation.

This past May, Casey’s second child, an 8-month-old daughter, was brought to the University of Minnesota Children’s Hospital. Casey maintained that the girl was ill, but doctors found nothing wrong with her and were monitoring her heart rate and conducting additional testing.

On May 17, Casey told a nurse that her daughter wasn’t breathing. Medical staff quickly applied CPR and found a pulse. Soon the girl was sitting up and smiling as she was wheeled to the intensive care unit. The physician found the girl’s immediate recovery suspicious and called authorities.

Under questioning from police, Casey brought up Munchausen’s and asked a number of questions about the disorder. She told police “that she remembered something like a dream where she put her hand over [her daughter’s] mouth until she stopped breathing and that maybe it wasn’t a dream,” according to the criminal complaint.

St. Louis Park police then reopened the case involving Alexander’s death and interviewed Casey at her home.

She admitted to holding blankets over the faces of both her children until they stopped breathing. She said that on March 12, 2009, the night Alexander died, she had suffocated him for more than two minutes, until he stopped breathing. She then tried to resuscitate him and ran downstairs to get help from her family.

Casey told police she thought that the boy would resuscitate easily because he had in the past, and that “she did not mean to hurt him.”

She told police that her motivation in suffocating her children was to get them to get them “more attention from the doctors she had been bringing them to.”