According to police, a 36-year-old woman in Florida talked to a 10-year-old girl through a social media video game and told the girl to kill a newborn baby and the adults the girls were living with at the time.
Police say that Tara Alexis Sykes was arrested last week and charged with one count of attempted murder while committing severe child abuse.
A child advocacy center called Gulf Coast Kid’s House on October 17, 2024, to report a 2-month-old baby who had been seriously hurt after being dropped on the kitchen floor by a 10-year-old. This was according to a news statement from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office.
Police said they found evidence that Sykes and the 10-year-old talked to each other online using Roblox, a popular game platform with a social media feature that lets users chat.
In this case, the police say that Sykes used the platform to teach the 10-year-old several ways to kill a baby.
The sheriff’s office said in a release, “In the communication thread, Sykes told the 10-year-old different ways to kill the baby.” “Sykes told the 10-year-old to make the baby drown in the bathtub, burn the baby with hot water, and drop the baby on the floor to kill it.”
Sykes had also taught the 10-year-old how to kill the adults she was staying with briefly by cutting their throats with a knife while they slept and setting fire to their house with aerosol spray and bed sheets.
Police said the 10-year-old even sprayed sheets with the aerosol spray, but in the end, the child was “unable to carry out the instructions.”
While Sykes was being held, Sheriff Chip W. Simmons said in a statement, “I have been a police officer for over 40 years and have never seen anything quite like this.”
“The situation and the thought that someone could think this way, let alone order these things to be done, really bothers me.” She’s not right in some way.
Police caught Sykes and her husband earlier this year and charged them with child neglect and endangerment because they let the 20-year-old man who sexually assaulted their 14-year-old daughter live with them. Court records show that this is because they let the man live with them.
On May 28, 2024, an inspector from the Department of Children and Families called deputies to the Sykes’ home in the 3000 block of Robertson Road to look into a 14-year-old girl who was 31 weeks pregnant and looked like she wasn’t getting enough food.
An statement of probable cause says that Sykes and her husband both admitted they knew their daughter was pregnant by a 20-year-old friend, but they did not report the “known sexual battery” against their daughter.
The parents are also said to have threatened to kill the 20-year-old if his grandma did not give them $10,000, which she did.
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Both cases against Sykes are still going on. She is being held in Escambia County Jail without bond at the moment.
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