‘Breaks My Heart’: Arizona Grandma, Husband Charged with Homicide After Boy, 11, Found Dead in Motel Room.
An Arizona grandmother and her husband are facing murder charges after paramedics who responded to a motel where the couple was staying found an 11-year-old boy with “significant injuries” who wasn’t breathing.
The child, the biological grandson of 51-year-old Stephanie Marie Davis, was declared dead at a hospital, Scottsdale police said in a news release obtained by PEOPLE.
A second child found in the care of Davis and her husband, 33-year-old Thomas James Desharnais, was turned over to the Department of Child Services, police said.
“Those kids were always taken care of,” Davis said Tuesday during a Maricopa County court hearing conducted via video, adding that any evidence to the contrary was “literally just circumstantial,” reports AZFamily.com.
Court documents obtained by the outlet say Davis told investigators that she found the 11-year-old, who was not named, in the bathtub and was doing CPR when officers arrived. Davis alleged the 11-year-old “had been ‘hurting himself’ all day” and had a history of self-harm.
AZFamily.com reported that Davis claimed the boy had hit himself in the head with a wrench while the family was watching a movie and then went to the bathroom and cut his genitals with a paring knife. She said she took the wrench from him and hid it under a mattress so he could not get it, and took the bloody knife to the kitchen and washed it.
Police say neither she nor her husband did anything to get the boy medical treatment, according to AZFamily.com.
PEOPLE was unable to immediately obtain or verify the court documents.
According to the documents cited by AZFamily.com, Davis has had custody of the boys since 2015, and the alleged abuse was ongoing.
Desharnais allegedly told investigators that Davis had pinched and bent the boys’ fingers with pliers and hit them in the head with a wooden broom, but that he did not intercede, according to the court documents.
Those documents allege that police found pliers and a broom handle in the motel room, as well as a paring knife and a wrench stained with what looked like blood residue under a mattress.
Officers first responded to the medical call about the boy not breathing and being unresponsive at the Extended Stay America around 4:50 p.m. Sunday, reports KTAR radio.
Jordan Barclay, who lives at the motel where the incident occurred, told AZFamily.com: “Breaks my heart, and the fact that I’m just on the other side of the building when the soul passed, it feels weird and heartbreaking.”
Davis and Desharnais were arrested and booked on charges of first-degree homicide and two counts of child abuse. Davis is being held on a $3.5 million cash bond, police said. Desharnais is being held on a $1.5 million cash bond.
An attorney or attorneys who might speak for them was not immediately named.
Courtney Lage, a former motel employee, said she had twice called the Department of Child Services to report concerns about the boys’ well-being under the adults’ care, reports AZFamily.com
“I worked in the office, so they would come up and pay and what not,” she said. “When the children were in there I never saw their eyes, they were always covered. They had baseball hats. She would never allow them to talk directly.”
She added: “I don’t know what happened to those poor little boys but I always say, you get that feeling when something isn’t right and there was something not right.”