A woman in Camden, N.J., committed suicide after decapitating her 2-year-old son and storing him in a freezer on Wednesday.
The Associated Press reports that Chevonne Thomas had been struggling with drugs and was being medicated for depression. Thomas admitted in a 911 call the day of the incident that she did not take her medication. An autopsy report shows that the child was alive before he was beheaded.
Police found the body of 2-year-old Zahree Thomas in the family's Camden rowhouse early Wednesday. His head was in the freezer. His mother, Chevonne Thomas, stabbed herself in the neck minutes after placing a rambling, sometimes incoherent call to 911. Thomas told a dispatcher that she had stabbed her son.
Thomas lost custody of the boy in 2010 after admitting to police that she smoked marijuana laced with the hallucinogenic drug PCP, blacked out and left Zahree alone in a car. She regained custody in April 2010 under an order signed by Judge Angelo DiCamillo of Camden County Superior Court's Family division, according to Tamara Kendig, a court spokeswoman.
Kendig said all standard procedures for placing a child in a home, including substance abuse, mental health and parenting skill evaluations were carried out in Thomas's case.
Jason Laughlin, a spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, said it will take weeks for toxicology tests to come back. But there were indications that Thomas might have still been using drugs, Laughlin said.
Read more at the Associated Press.