Summer Rose Kazzee’s young boy was taken from her care when he became malnourished. The infant was malnourished at 8 weeks of age, weighing less than his birth weight. Kazzee was found guilty of first-degree endangering the welfare of a child after a two-day trial for starving her newborn baby. Although the crime carried a maximum penalty of six years in jail, Kazzee received just three.
After learning about Kazzee’s upbringing, others believed the penalty was still too severe. Kazzee said under interrogation by her attorney Clay Janske that she was home-schooled after being tormented in public school and had a ninth-grade education. She also said that she was raped and sexually abused from the ages of three to ten by a guy who was subsequently convicted and sentenced to two life sentences for rape.
Despite the fact that Kazzee was finally deemed competent to stand trial, Janske said that she was poorly functioning and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, leaving him startled by her jail term. He acknowledges that Summer was a bad mother, but to sentence her to jail after the jury heard about her life is unconscionable. He presented proof that she was raped for most of her life, has no education, and is miserable, he remarked incredulously. It was simply callous for them to impose prison time.
The jury approved the punishment after an hour of deliberation. Arkansas was one of the few states at the time where juries decided punishments. Janske said that it may be time for Arkansas to join the majority of states in permitting only judges to set punishments, yet it appears that the verdict was correct. Three years after starving her son, the 22-year-old Arkansas woman was jailed again when her 20-month-old daughter, Lucy Weber, passed away in her care.
Kazzee was paroled roughly eight months after being sentenced to three years for endangering her child, allowing her the chance to hurt one of her twins, who were born after she was arrested for harming her son. Cops came to a Hot Springs residence in response to allegations of an unconscious kid to discover members of the Hot Springs Fire Department doing CPR to Lucy.
First responders performed CPR long after LifeNet arrived, but their efforts to resuscitate the child were futile. Lucy was rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where she was declared dead, and Summer Rose Kazzee was once again blamed for the injury that occurred to her child while she was caring for her.
Kazzee said to the police that she attempted to put the twins down for a nap about 3 p.m. When the child refused to sleep, Kazzee placed her in a car seat on the floor. She said that after securing the top and bottom straps of the car seat, her daughter started “rocking herself to sleep,” at which point she left the twins in the rear bedroom, shut the door, and walked to the front living room.
An hour and a half later, according to Kazzee, she checked on her kids. She said that her kid was rocking and “even clapping her hands.” Kazzee stated she jumped off the sofa after realizing she couldn’t hear her kid after another thirty minutes. She told investigators that she raced into Lucy’s bedroom and saw the car seat belt around her neck.
As authorities questioned the child’s capacity to unbuckle the seat herself, Kazzee ultimately revealed that she may not have strapped it all the way and that her daughter used the car seat as a baby. Kazzee said that Lucy had never before unbuckled the car seat and that she had placed a blanket across the bottom buckle so the child would not play with it.
The medical examiner assessed the straps and the victim’s height to find that the kid could not have unbuckled the seatbelt independently. According to Garland County Jail records, Kazzee was booked on negligent homicide charges. It is reported that during her trial, Chief Deputy Prosecutor Kara Petro said that Lucy was placed in an infant car seat that was a touch too small for her.
The seat was just secured at the top, enabling Lucy to move about and “scoot down to the bottom.” The child got the buckle around her neck, where it put pressure on the blood vessels and cut off the flow of blood, causing her to be “strangled,” according to the prosecution. They also said that Kazzee was careless for leaving the child alone for so long.
Kazzee pleaded guilty to minor counts in Lucy’s death. She was granted credit for time already served and sentenced to just seven months in prison. This is the second pitiful injustice committed to Summer Rose Kazzee. If she had served her three-year term in prison, her daughter would still be alive. Kazzee was therefore released, her twins were left in her “care,” and one innocent kid has since perished. The parole board ought to feel shame.
