November 22, 2009
- Portland, Oregon
Attorney: Sex offender impregnated Wash. girl who drowned baby in toilet
By KOMO Staff & News Services
PORT ANGELES, Wash. -- The attorney for a Port Angeles teen suspected of drowning an infant boy in a toilet says the murder charges against her client are inappropriate.
Suzanne Hayden of the Clallum County public defender's office says 16-year-old Lauryn Louise Last was impregnated by a sex offender in his 30s in Colorado. Hayden says Last is a child who didn't even know she was in labor and went into shock after giving birth on a toilet. She called the infant's death a horrible tragedy but said charging her client with first-degree murder as an adult is inappropriate. Last is being held in a juvenile detention center in Port Angeles in lieu of $500,000 bail. The baby's body was found Monday by authorities combing through 60 tons of trash at a dump site near Tacoma. In an affidavit filed that day, Port Angeles police Detective Jesse Winfield alleged that Last "put her baby face down into a toilet and allowed it to drown for several minutes until it died. Then she threw her son into the trash can outside in a plastic garbage bag." Port Angeles Police Chief Terry Gallagher has said that DNA testing to confirm the infant's parentage might not be available for a month or more. Last's father, Ronald Last Jr., 41, was charged Monday with being a felon in possession of a firearm and possession of methamphetamine, both felonies, and with concealing a birth, a gross misdemeanor, the prosecutor added. He remained in the Clallam County jail. Ronald Last has an extensive court record with civil and criminal cases dating from 1985 in King, Snohomish, Kitsap and Clallam counties, Gallagher said. Investigators in Port Angeles, about 65 miles northwest of Seattle on the Olympic Peninsula, believe the baby boy died after being born to the girl on or about Dec. 31, and then was put in the trash. Garbage from that day was in two containers that initially were taken to a transfer station in Tacoma, about 80 miles southeast of Port Angeles, for transshipment to Oregon. The containers were then rerouted to a site in Graham, about eight miles southeast of Tacoma, to provide more room for the search that found the baby's body. Last's father is charged with concealing a birth, a gross misdemeanor. |
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