LEXINGTON (Kentucky Today) – A former University of Kentucky athlete who was already facing several charges after allegedly giving birth to a child and putting him into a garbage bag at her home has been indicted for manslaughter by a Fayette County grand jury.
Laken Snelling, 21, was indicted by a Fayette County grand jury on multiple charges: first-degree manslaughter, abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence and concealing the birth of an infant.
She was arrested in August after police found an infant’s remains in a trash bag inside a closet at her home in Lexington.
The baby was born alive and died of asphyxia, according to the Kentucky medical examiner’s office.
An arrest citation details that the infant was found wrapped in a towel inside of a black trash bag and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Snelling was interviewed by officers and admitted to giving birth and “to concealing the birth by cleaning any evidence, placing all cleaning items used inside of a black trash bag, including the infant, who was wrapped in a towel.”
Snelling told police she gave birth in her bedroom around 4 a.m. and the baby fell on the floor, according to her arrest citation.
“She didn’t think the baby was breathing or alive,” police said in the citation.
After giving birth, she stayed awake for another 30 minutes before “falling on top of the baby and going back to sleep,” the citation said.
It is not revealed how long Snelling was asleep in the report, but she said that when she did wake up her newborn was “turning blue and purple.”
Snelling allegedly told the officer that she then wrapped her baby in a towel “like a burrito” and laid next to the newborn on the floor of her bedroom.
She said that this “gave her a little comfort in the moment,” according to the affidavits.
Snelling then went back to sleep until her alarm went off at 7:30 a.m., the citation alleged, at which point she cleaned up the blood and afterbirth in her bedroom, placed the towel-wrapped baby in a trash bag and her placenta “inside of a zip lock bag,” which she also tossed in the trash bag.
Snelling, who is from White Pine, Tenn., has withdrawn from UK. She was previously a member of the school’s STUNT team. She has been out on bond at her parents’ home in Tennessee.
