(Image: Escambia County Sheriff’s Office)
A Florida woman is in jail after allegedly contacting a 10-year-old via Roblox, a popular multiplayer online game, and instructing him to kill a newborn baby and the adults he and the baby were living with.
Tara Alexis Sykes was arrested last week and charged with a count of attempted murder while engaged in aggravated child abuse, the authorities said, noting that the case is one of the most heinous and strange they’d seen before.
The 36-year-old mother allegedly met the boy on the gaming platform and struck up a chat with him via its chat component, though how the conversation turned to infanticide remains unclear.
Nevertheless, the mother allegedly instructed the boy to kill the 2-month-old he was living with, then to slit the throats of both adults in the home before setting the place ablaze to destroy evidence.
Investigators were called by the Gulf Coast Kid’s House, a child advocacy center, after reports of a 2-month-old sustaining “serious injuries after being dropped on the kitchen floor by a 10-year-old,” a news release from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office said. The incident reportedly occurred on Thursday.
The sheriff’s office went on to detail the numerous heinous ways in which Sykes instructed the child to commit infanticide, writing, “Sykes instructed the 10-year-old to drown the infant in the bathtub, burn the infant with scalding water and drop the infant on the floor to kill the infant.
Additionally, Sykes had instructed the 10-year-old on how to kill the adults the 10-year-old was temporarily living with by cutting their throats with a knife while they slept and burning their house by dousing bed sheets with aerosol spray and setting them on fire.”
The sheriff’s office said the boy did go on to douse the sheets with aerosol, but he wasn’t ultimately able to “carry out the instructions.” The case shocked Escambia County Sheriff Chip W. Simmons, who said in a statement of his own following Sykes’ arrest, “I have been in Law Enforcement for over 40 years and have never seen anything quite like this.
I am truly disturbed by the circumstances and the thought that anyone could think like this, let alone instruct these acts to be carried out. There is something really wrong with her.” The harrowing case of the attempted infanticide nearly carried out at Sykes’ instruction comes just months after she and her husband were arrested and charged with a count of child neglect each for endangering their impregnated 14-year-old daughter by allowing the 20-year-old man who had impregnated her to live in the family’s home, according to court records obtained by Law&Crime.
That case began back on May 28, when deputies responded to the Sykes’ home at the request of an investigator from the Department of Children and Families. The department reportedly noted that the girl was suffering from malnutrition and that she was 31 weeks pregnant at the time.
Both reportedly admitted, according to a probable cause affidavit, that they knew their daughter had been impregnated by a 20-year-old acquaintance of theirs. They both failed to report the “known sexual battery” against their daughter, then threatened to kill the 20-year-old, it was reported if his grandmother didn’t pay them $10,000.
The woman did, the authorities said. Both cases against Sykes remain open, Law&Crime reported, and she’s currently being held in Escambia County Jail without bond.
