A woman was arrested in a small North Texas town on Tuesday after police discovered she had been forcing her 11-year-old daughter to live with her father’s body for several weeks, local media reported this week.
Susan Que Smith was arrested and imprisoned for child endangerment, tampering with evidence and failure to declare death. She explained to the police that she had not declared the death of Allen Wiest, the father of her daughter, for fear of being evicted from his accommodation where the man was not supposed to be.
The mother and her daughter had been living with this decomposing body for three or four weeks, in the town of Electra, in the middle of the oil fields. On December 1, the local police chief, Terry Wooten, had visited the scene after being informed of the presence of flies and odors coming from an open window of the apartment.
Support by child protective services
Having received no response after knocking on her door, her team had entered Susan Que Smith’s apartment and discovered, in the hallway, the corpse covered with a blanket and garbage bags. Without running water, the apartment was littered with garbage and was deemed “unlivable”, according to the police report seen by NBC’s KFDX-TV.
Susan Que Smith told the police that the body was that of the child’s father. An arrest warrant was issued on January 13 against him. Her daughter was taken into the care of child protective services and hospitalized with infections from insect bites.