In the end, Yolo County sheriff’s officials said, Samantha Green’s claim of being kidnapped along with her infant son just didn’t hold up.
Green had provided possible suspect names to detectives investigating the death of 3-week-old Justice Rees, whose tiny body was found Wednesday morning on the bank of a Knights Landing slough.
However, “we were able to establish that those particular individuals … could not have been at that location at the time she indicated this took place,” Sheriff Ed Prieto said at a press conference Saturday announcing Green’s arrest on suspicion of murder. Green “was the sole person responsible for the death of her child.”
Green, who turned 23 on the same day a search-and-rescue team recovered Justice’s onesie-clad body from the dense thickets lining Ridge Cut Slough, was taken into custody at 12:15 a.m. Saturday at the Sheriff’s Office in Woodland, following the latest of several interviews with investigators.
She is being held without bail at the Yolo County Jail, where she has denied media requests for interviews. Her arraignment is scheduled for 11 a.m. Wednesday in Yolo Superior Court.
Green has no arrest history, her only prior run-ins with local law-enforcement being traffic tickets for driving without a hands-free device for her cell phone in 2008, and for speeding in 2009, court records show.
Yolo County Public Defender Tracie Olson, whose office is expected to represent Green, declined to comment on the case Saturday.
Whether the open murder count is revised or added to will be up to the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office, which is still awaiting further reports from the Sheriff’s Office, Chief Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Raven said.
Green’s family and friends, meanwhile, were struggling Saturday to make sense of the week’s tragic events.
“We’re pretty devastated,” Justice’s paternal grandmother Patty Rees, sounding emotionally drained, said when reached by phone Saturday afternoon at her Woodland home, where the baby had been living along with Green and the baby’s father, Frank Rees.
She said sheriff’s detectives took Green in for the interview on Friday and “basically badgered her for about six or seven hours” before she was able to call her family.
Asked whether she still believes an abduction occurred, Rees paused before saying, “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Randy Green, Samantha’s father, declined comment on Saturday but said he would release a statement today.
Prieto declined to discuss the chain of events that occurred prior to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, when Green — wet, disheveled and crying hysterically — was found on the east levee of Ridge Cut Slough, a waterway that runs along the south edge of Knights Landing.
She and the infant had been reported missing the day before, and it would be another 17 hours, shortly before 10 a.m. Wednesday, before searchers located Justice’s body, across the slough from where Green had been. How he got there remains unclear.
His cause of death has not been established pending further testing, but could have been the result of exposure or drowning and likely occurred before the multi-agency search for him began Tuesday evening, coroner’s officials said following an autopsy Thursday.
Initially, sheriff’s officials said there was no indication his death was a homicide. But Prieto said Green’s version of events “changed somewhat” over the course of her law-enforcement interviews, ultimately yielding information they say justified the woman’s arrest.
“The detectives just did a real exceptional job in trying to determine what transpired,” Prieto said, noting the toll the investigation — like all cases involving children — has taken on his personnel. “I can only imagine what her (Green’s) family is going through.”
Randy Green told reporters last week that his last contact with his daughter took place on Saturday, Feb. 21, when they made plans to visit with Samantha and her new baby. But the pair never showed up.
Green was young and inexperienced but seemed to be handling first-time motherhood well, according to Patty Rees, who told The Enterprise she last saw Green on Monday morning as she got Frank Rees’ four other children ready for school. But Green failed to pick them up from school as expected, prompting the missing-person report.
Her family and friends made extensive use of social media to try to determine their whereabouts, posting missing-person alerts on Facebook and other outlets. Frank Rees, 29, pleaded for information on his own Facebook page, offering $5,000 and “whatever else you want that I own” in exchange for the safe return of his son.
Samantha Green’s Facebook page, meanwhile, featured no pictures of baby Justice until early Friday morning, when Green posted the infant’s image as her profile photo, followed by a side view of her pregnant belly, the baby’s full name — Justice Talliesen R-Lee Rees — superimposed on it.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene
