by Chinwe Okafor
A 22-day-old baby starved to death in a car seat as her parents ate in a restaurant chain famous for its ‘endless buffet’.
Baby Betsey Kee Stephens was found “completely unresponsive and cold to the touch” after being strapped into a car in central Florida.
Apparently, her parents Ruby Stephens, 23, and Roy Stephens, 48, had been eating in a branch of the Golden Corral restaurant chain before the tragedy. They have now been charged with first-degree murder.
A medical examiner later determined Betset’s death as a homicide resulting from “starvation due to neglect” while a further autopsy revealed that the infant weighed four pounds and one ounce at death as against the normal eight pounds, having lost about 2.5 pounds since her birth.
According to reports, the baby was dehydrated and appeared not to have been fed for six to seven hours prior to her death.
Her mother, Ruby Stephens had initially told police she had been breast-feeding the baby every few hours but after police told her about the autopsy’s findings, she acknowledged Betsey had not been fed for much of their day-long road trip, with highway traffic making it difficult to exit to feed her.
The mother later told police that the infant had shown signs of health issues, but she had missed an appointment to have her weight checked before the Florida trip.
She also told the authorities that Roy Stephens was not the biological father and had not paid much attention to her from birth.
The mother further revealed that after arriving at a hotel earlier on December 23, she had “checked the baby’s feet and covered them with a blanket because they were cold.”
