WOODLAND — From the back of an ambulance, a distraught Samantha Lee Green described finding the lifeless body of her 19-day-old son on the levee of a Knights Landing slough.
“He was propped up on a tree right next to me,” Green, her voice scratchy with emotion and fatigue, told Woodland police Detective Tamara Pelle. “His little body was just leaning up against me. …He was so cold.”
It was the evening of Feb. 24, and the search had just gotten underway for little Justice Rees, who according to his mother was clad in just a diaper and a gray onesie when she took him out onto the levee the day before.
In an audio recording played during the first day of Green’s preliminary hearing Monday in Yolo Superior Court, Green told Pelle she had “blacked out” after arriving in Knights Landing to look for her fiancé, and “I don’t know how I got where I was.”
“Everything’s all foggy,” Green said, then asked to speak to her fiancé and Justice’s father, Frank Rees. She also denied using alcohol or drugs or having problems adjusting to motherhood.
But Yolo County prosecutors allege that Green, 23, abused both methamphetamine and marijuana during and after her pregnancy and have charged her with murder and child endangerment in connection with Justice’s death, saying in court documents that she took him into the Ridge Cut Slough area “for no legitimate reason.”
This week’s preliminary hearing, scheduled to take place over several days in Judge David Rosenberg’s courtroom, will determine whether there is sufficient evidence for those charges to stand. Green has pleaded not guilty.
She appeared in court Monday wearing a green-and-white striped jail uniform, occasionally looking over her right shoulder at relatives and other supporters attending the hearing — several of whom wept while hearing Green’s recorded voice recalling the discovery of her baby’s death.
Searchers found Justice’s body on the morning of Feb. 25 — Green’s birthday — amid the dense thickets that border the slough.
The events leading to that discovery began two days earlier, when according to testimony offered in court, Green and Frank Rees argued at a gas station over plans to pick up a female friend in Knights Landing. Although they initially planned to drive there together, Green backed out and sent Rees on his own.
Then, suspicious that Rees was cheating on her — as she later told Pelle — Green again changed her mind. She went to her Woodland home to prepare a bottle of formula for Justice, then drove with him to Knights Landing.
That was the last anyone heard from either mother or son until the following evening, when local resident Ricardo Villasenor spotted Green — wet, scratched and bruised — yelling and waving for help on Ridge Cut Road.
Green claimed “that she had been kidnapped,” testified Yolo County Sheriff’s Deputy Jose Pineda, who responded to Villasenor’s 5:08 p.m. 911 call. “He said she had told him that she was there the night before with her infant, and she left the baby behind … because he was dead and had froze.”
Later, while being treated at Woodland Memorial Hospital, Green told sheriff’s investigators that as she searched for Rees on the levee road, she encountered a male friend of the couple who tried to sexually assault her, Detective Brian Young said.
“She basically said she was crawling and crossed the canal,” her baby tucked inside her pea coat as she swam, Young said. He noted that Green appeared to be in “severe pain” during the interview, and she acknowledged the assault may not have been real.
“I wasn’t sure whether she understood what she was telling us, or not,” Young said. According to court documents, Green would later recant the kidnapping and assault story as “bull—-.”
The detective also interviewed Frank Rees, who said after picking up the female friend in Knights Landing he drove into a rural area where the pair “fooled around, and then I believe his (vehicle) battery died.”
Rees denied the allegations of infidelity in a statement to Pelle, the Woodland police detective, but admitted that he and Green had discussed adding a third person to their intimate life.
“We opened the doors to having an open relationship,” Rees said during the interview, which also was recorded and played Monday in court.
It had only been several days since baby Justice had been returned to his parents, the family coming to the attention of child welfare services after the baby tested positive for methamphetamine at birth. He was released to Green and Rees’ custody following the development of a “safety plan,” relatives said.
Sheriff’s detectives arrested Rees in March after reportedly finding methamphetamine and a drug smoking pipe in his home during the investigation into Justice’s death. He made a plea agreement in September and was sentenced to probation and a 180-day drug treatment program.
Green’s preliminary hearing continues at 1:30 p.m. today.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene