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Glen Rose, Texas Mother Arrested After Allegedly Putting 2-Year-Old Daughter In Hot Oven

By Pam Wright
Published on: 06:40 PST, Mar 20, 2016

A mother in Glen Rose, Texas, was arrested Thursday after allegedly putting her 2-year-old child in the family’s oven.

According to the Glen Rose Reporter, Somervell County Sheriff’s Department confirmed Sunday that Tasha Shontell Hatcher, 35, of Glen Rose was arrested after witnesses on scene told sheriff’s deputies that Hatcher put her 2-year-old child in the family’s oven.

The Dallas Daily News reports the girl was taken by ambulance to Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth and then transported via air ambulance to Parkland Burn Center in Dallas, according to the Somervell County Sheriff’s Department.

Hatcher was arraigned on Saturday on charges of injury to a child with serious bodily injury – a first-degree felony – with a bond set at $300,000.

The Child Protective Service’s spokeswoman, Marissa Gonzales, said the girl has been removed from the family’s custody and is being treated for her injuries.

The Daily Mail reports the Glen Rose child‘s uncle says he and other relatives forbidden from having any contact with the girl during the investigation.

A former co-worker of Hatcher’s told the Glen Rose Reporter on Saturday that the child is sedated and in stable condition.

According to Hatcher’s Facebook page, the single mother works at Quality Inn and Suites and attends StoneWater Church in Glen Rose.

It is unclear why the Glen Rose mother harmed her child, but these types of horrific crimes to children happen all too often.

In 2014, after Catherine Hoggle disappeared with her two young children in Washington, D.C., officials launched an intensive search for the mentally-ill woman, her 2-year-old son, and 3-year-old daughter.

After more than a week of searching, investigators began a homicide case against the woman, believing she may have committed the unimaginable crime of harming her children.

The children have yet to be found.

That case was the third time within a matter of weeks that a mother had been suspected of harming her offspring in the Washington area, according to the Washington Post.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis, is considered an expert on the evolutionary, psychological, and historical factors behind infanticide and has said that women with little support may be at greater risk of harming a child.

“[I]n societies where women have a lot of social support and also have access to birth control and education about birth control and the freedom to use it — in those societies, rates of child abandonment and infanticide are going to be very low. It is in the societies where you don’t have those ­choices where the rate goes up.”

Phillip J. Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University’s Medical School who is considered to be an expert in the study of filicide — the murder of a child between the ages of one and 18 — said there are really five basic motives for filicide, according to the Washington Post.

“These include ‘altruistic filicide,’ when a mother kills in the belief she is saving her child from a fate worse than death; ‘acutely psychotic filicide,’ in which a mother obeys voices or hallucinations commanding her to do so; ‘fatal maltreatment filicide,’ in which a child dies from abuse or neglect; and ‘unwanted child filicide,’ in which a mother rids herself of a child perceived as a hindrance. The rarest motive involves a mother seeking revenge against her spouse — like Medea, a figure in Greek myth who killed her children to avenge herself against their father after he had abandoned her for another woman.”

In the end, the motive behind the Glen Rose mother deciding to put her child in a hot oven is still a mystery and may forever remain a mystery.

[Image via Twitter/BitzNews]

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