Parents have been arrested in Oklahoma and face murder charges following the death of their son at Saint Anthony’s Midwest Hospital. Police detained the 37-year-old father and 30-year-old mother after receiving hospital reports that their 7-year-old child was admitted with internal and external injuries, as well as severe malnourishment. The child was pronounced dead, and hospital officials quickly informed police of her condition.
Officer Jeff McNeil said the father had given conflicting accounts about the child’s health, while both parents stated that the girl merely had the flu.
After holding Anthony Yonko and Lisa Mitchell for hours of questioning, prosecutors charged them both with murder. Yonko faced additional charges, including one count of torture, one count of maiming, and one count of injuring a child.
Hospital staff told reporters that Mitchell brought the child to Midwest Hospital wrapped in a blanket, where she was soon pronounced dead. The child “had signs of rigor mortis,” staff said.
The prosecution affidavit stated that a doctor had noted “numerous amounts of black and dark red secretions” from the little girl’s mouth and that she weighed just 25 pounds and was approximately 37 inches tall.
Yonko told police that he had been staying with Mitchell and woke from sleep to find the girl was “sick and needed to go to the hospital.” The suspected killer said a “friend” took him and the child to seek medical help, but later claimed it was his brother. Police said he changed his story several times and even claimed that the girl weighed 50 pounds just days before her death and was “completely healthy.”
The case was the second involving child neglect and abuse in Oklahoma in a matter of weeks. In July, Amanda Irene Smith and Joel Richard Smith were sentenced to 20 years in prison after authorities found a 9-year-old child in their care who weighed 41 pounds and wore a urine-soaked diaper. Court records showed that the couple tied up the child and beat her with a livestock whip. The girl testified that she was rarely fed, saying, “Sometimes I got so hungry I would eat pieces of trash or pick corn out of the pig poop.”
