WOODLAND — Samantha Green had just hazy memories of her final hours with her infant son, but investigators pieced together the pair’s movements in the clues they left behind.
Shortly after Green emerged disheveled and hysterical from Ridge Cut Slough in Knights Landing on the evening of Feb. 24 — her 19-day-old baby Justice Rees nowhere in sight — searchers summoned a Placer County sheriff’s K-9 to retrace their path.
Yolo County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dean Nyland recalled the desperate search in Yolo Superior Court on Tuesday, the second day of Green’s preliminary hearing to determine whether the Woodland woman should stand trial on murder and child endangerment charges in connection with Justice’s death.
Nyland said the dog began its quest on Reed Court in southwest Knights Landing, obtaining a scent from the abandoned sport-utility vehicle Green had driven there the day before in search of her fiancé, Frank Rees, who had gone to the town to pick up a female friend.
From there, the dog pulled its handler down a path to a levee road, then down to the slough, which runs in an L-shape around the town’s southwestern border.
“He maintained interest all in this area, all along the shoreline,” Nyland testified, aiming a laser pointer at a map of where the slough bends from a north-south direction to an east-west path. Later that night, searchers would find Green’s diaper bag — diapers, a bottle and other baby items still inside — on the opposite bank of the slough.
Whether it was taken there or washed up on shore after becoming lost in the water was not immediately clear, Nyland said. Divers found Green’s purse submerged in the slough about three weeks later.
Those items were discovered west of where Highway 113 crosses over the slough into Knights Landing, Nyland said. On the east side of the bridge surfaced additional clues, including the black pea coat Green told detectives she had tucked Justice into after taking him from the car.
“It was damp,” Nyland recalled.
The police K-9 also alerted to the shoreline on the slough’s north side, where Green had surfaced on a levee road behind a residential cul-de-sac on the southeast side of town.
It wasn’t until about 10 a.m. on Feb. 25 — 17 hours after Green appeared — that two of the dozens of searchers combing the area found Justice’s tiny body in a wooded thicket, about 200 feet across the slough from where his mother had summoned help and claimed to have been kidnapped and sexually assaulted.
“The baby was sitting up against a tree,” his right arm off to the side “with his fist clenched,” Nyland testified. Justice’s left arm lay across his stomach, his left hand “also in a clenched position.”
Both the diaper and the onesie Justice had been dressed in were wet to the touch — consistent with being submerged in water, Nyland said. Earlier Tuesday, sheriff’s Detective Hernan Oviedo testified that temperatures had dipped into the low 40s and 30s during the two nights Green and her baby were missing.
Yolo County prosecutors have alleged that Green, 23, was under the influence of methamphetamine in the days leading up to her baby’s death, and that she intentionally took him into the desolate slough after concluding that Rees had been unfaithful to her.
Infidelity had been the subject of multiple arguments between the couple, according to Nyland. He said they fought about it in their garage on Feb. 20, and again on the morning of the 23rd, as Green “felt Frank needed to spend more time with her and the baby and not be going to Knights Landing.”
But they were back together on Feb. 26, the day after Justice’s body was found, “on Wisconsin Street (in Woodland), attempting to score dope — dope being methamphetamine,” Nyland said.
The hearing continues this afternoon in Judge David Rosenberg’s courtroom.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene