Jesslinn Hulett.

by Tracy McCue, Sumner Newscow — Shelby Johnson of Oxford, the mother of 7-month-old Jesslinn Hulett, has been charged with two alternative counts of murder in the first degree, an off-grid personal felony, for an incident that occurred in April.

Johnson, born in 1992, has been charged with unlawfully killing a human being and did so by either knowingly cruelly beating or shaking resulting in great bodily harm to the child, according to a criminal complaint filed this afternoon by Kerwin Spencer, Sumner County Attorney.

Johnson is currently be held in Sumner County Jail on $250,000 bond.

Johnson has also be charged with murder in the second degree, a level 2 felony; child abuse, a level 5 felony; and aggravated endangering a child, a level 9 felony.

According to the complaint, on Easter Sunday, April 1, about 9:16 a.m., Hulett was brought to the emergency room at Sumner Regional Medical Center by her father Schuyler Hulett from his home at 120 N. Woodlawn in Wellington after it was reported through 911 that the child was not breathing.

A Wellington Police Department officer was at the hospital and spoke with Johnson in the hospital’s conference room that morning in which she said she got up with the 7-month-old about 7:30 a.m., fed her and put her back to bed. She also told the officer, she went to bed as well.

Schuyler got up shortly before calling 911 and found Jesslinn not breathing with vomit coming from her mouth, the complaint said. They left his two other children at his home and after Jesslin was brought to SRMC, Schuyler decided to return home to check on the children where they met another WPD officer. Schuyler explained that Jesslinn was sleeping on the floor in the living room after she had come with her mother to Wellington from Johnson’s house in Oxford yesterday afternoon for a family fishing expedition on the river.

Schuyler continued to tell officers, according to the complaint, that they got home late last night so they had put Jesslinn to sleep on the floor behind the sofa in the corner of the living room about 9:30 p.m. Schuyler said Johnson told him she got up around 7:30 a.m. and fed Jesslinn a bottle of milk. They both went back to sleep. He then woke up later and decided to make a bottle, and when he checked on the baby he could see milk coming from her nose and mouth and she was not breathing. He grabbed her and ran to the bedroom yelling at Johnson that she was not breathing and to call 911.

According to the complaint, he told the police that he started CPR on her and laid her on the floor in the living room, but eventually decided it would be quicker to take her to the hospital and then left. The two other children were not awake yet. After going to SRMC emergency room she was transported to Wesley Medical Center. A registered SRMC nurse told a WPD officer that she had noticed a soft hematoma on the right side of her head which the doctor confirmed.

The mother of the child was then interviewed, where she said the two were sleeping in one bedroom and the children in the other and the baby on the floor and repeated the story that she fed her and put her to bed before going back to bed herself.

Two doctors got to SRMC and were able to get a pulse but the child was not breathing on her own. They stabilized her and authorized her transport to Wesley. While there, a doctor from the Pediatric Critical Care Team at Wesley that the baby had suffered a traumatic brain injury. After the interviews with the father, mother and maternal grandmother the statements were very similar with both parents denying Jesslinn had suffered any falls or traumatic events from the past evening.

The doctor then wrote on April 2 that the 7 1/2 month old child with altered mental status, had soft tissue swelling to the scalp, skull fracture, retinal hemorrhages and severe cerebral edema as a result of inflicted trauma brain injury. On April 5 at 8;30 a.m., Jesslinn was pronounced brain dead and was taken off life support shortly thereafter. The coroner reported the time of death at 8:32 a.m due to acute skull fracture with intracranial swelling.

On April 14, Wellington Police Chief of Police Tracy Heath took a report from a neighbor that at 11:30 p.m. he overheard a man yelling and a woman’s voice coming from his neighbor’s house. They were arguing. Then he heard the man scream ‘you killed my f—ing baby” There was some more yelling, but he could not understand it.

According to the complaint, Heath determined through his investigation that the only two people with access to the child during the pertinent time frame on the morning of April 1 were Jesslin’s parents.

On June 7, an FBI agent Derek Velazco became involved in the investigation at the request of Heath. Valazco interviewed both parents, and Schuyler admitted to investigators that the two did have a fight and admitted he accused Johnson of killing the baby but he did not see she her actually hurt the child and she never admitted that she did it to him.

When the FBI agent interviewed Johnson, he confronted her with the fact Jesslinn had broken ribs. Johnson claimed the baby never acted like she was in pain and did not cry so it did not make sense that she had broken ribs. She also had no explanation why Jesslinn had a head injury.

The Wesley doctor was then re-interviewed and she explained that the child’s death was caused due to the injury to the brain cells as opposed to skull fractures. There was like a goose egg on the scalp with soft tissue swelling. The brain injury had to have happened within a very short time prior to the baby being discovered not breathing. Thus, the head injury had to have occurred sometime that morning as opposed to the previous day.

The Wesley doctor explained that the injury was caused by either shaking the child violently and in the course of shaking the child the child’s head struck something causing the skull fracture or the child’s head is struck onto something hard at least three times without shaking. When asked if a 5-year-old could have caused the injuries, the doctor said absolutely not.

On April 6 an autopsy was performed and it was determined the 7-month-old female child suffered from blunt force trauma to the head including scalp contusions, intrascalp and subscalp hemorrhage, subperiosteal hemorrhage, and fractures to the right parietal bone and occipital bone. She also had bilateral retinal hemorrhages. There was also blunt force trauma to the trunk as evidence by healing fracture of the left fourth through eighth ribs. He concluded that the cause of death was the blunt force trauma to the head and the matter of the death was homicide.