Minnesota — A 28-year-old woman has been arrested after police found the body of her 6-year-old son in the trunk of her car in a suburb of Minneapolis, authorities and relatives said.
Orono police said the woman and a man were arrested on suspicion of murder after the boy’s body was found Friday, after police received a tip about a vehicle moving forward with a shattered rear window and a flat tire. When officers stopped the car in Mound, Minnesota, they realized it was smeared with blood.
Police have not released details about the minor or the circumstances of his death. As of Sunday, neither the woman nor the man had been officially arraigned.
Relatives said the boy’s father was trying to get custody of him. The boy was returned to his mother in December after spending nearly a year in foster care because the woman was not taking proper care of him.
Since the mother regained custody of the boy, he had been behaving erratically, misbehaving at school and displaying symptoms of anxiety, relatives said.
Nikita Kronberg, who was a surrogate mother for the boy for 11 months, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that social workers “badly failed this boy.” The social worker in charge of the case did not immediately respond to messages sent by the newspaper.
The father’s fiancée told the newspaper that the boy was a patient and happy boy who loved to play with prams and wanted to be a firefighter. He suffered from a rare genetic problem that caused kidney disease and hearing difficulties, for which he had to use hearing aids.