(PartiallyPolitics.com) – On Friday, the Collier County Sheriff’s Office put out a statement on Facebook claiming that Nicole Marie Laber, 29, had staged her 8-month-old daughter’s death to hide her alleged culpability in the incident. According to the police statement, while the scene was made to appear as if a dog bowl was involved in the drowning of the little girl, the police alleged that it was likely that the girl had been left unattended in a booster seat in a bathtub which is what caused the accident.
The drowning had occurred on June 17, and the authorities had been called to the scene at 7:40 a.m. local time.
The sheriff’s office explained that the infant had most likely drowned as a result of the booster seat tipping over and trapping the little girl underwater in the bathtub. The hospital pronounced the child dead shortly after.
The release originally presented the child as “an infant in [Laber’s] care,” but it was later revealed by local news station WBBH-TV that the baby had been the daughter of the suspect.
The sheriff’s office later explained that after arriving at the scene, Laber had claimed that she had temporarily left the infant alone in the home as she tried to retrieve her dog and older child that had run out of the home. She claimed that upon returning to the home she had found her infant daughter with her “face-down, in the dog’s water bowl.” However, investigations caused the deputies to suspect that this was not actually the case and that Laber had dressed the child in a diaper before calling the authorities to the scene.
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