Boyfriend in tainted breast milk case gets 15 years
FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) — The boyfriend of the Fort Wayne woman who plotted to kill her brother’s baby with breast milk tainted with a lethal amount of an over-the-counter pain medicine has been sentenced for his role.
An Allen Superior Court judge on Tuesday sentenced Sir Marshall Snyder III to 15 years for Aiding an Attempted Aggravated Battery, in line with a plea deal with Allen County prosecutors he agreed to last month.
Snyder was initially charged last January with a felony Aiding Attempted Murder, but the charge was dropped as part of the plea agreement.
Marshall was the boyfriend of Sarai Rodriguez-Miranda, arrested in 2017 after police learned she aimed to kill her infant niece by putting pain relief medication in a bottle of breast milk. Authorities said Rodriguez-Miranda had been angry that her brother, his fiance and their daughter had been staying with her and her mother at their Fort Wayne home, and that her mother had agreed to allow them to stay longer.
In January 2017, her mother found text messages on the cellphone she and Rodriguez-Miranda shared in which her daughter told her boyfriend – Snyder – about her attempts to kill the then-11-week-old girl.
Court documents alleged that in that text exchange, the pair discussed the process of crushing up acetaminophen and sleeping pills and putting it in the bottle, researching how long it takes to kill a baby, and how she would not feel guilty.
After reading the texts, Rodriguez-Miranda’s mother took screen shots of the text messages and checked two bottles of breast milk kept in the home’s refrigerator. According to court documents, she found that one bottle contained milk darker than the other and had residue at the bottom of the bottle and a greenish-colored ring.
The baby was not harmed, but the milk stored in a refrigerator contained the equivalent of nine Excedrin tablets or capsules – enough to kill an adult, according to court documents.
Rodriguez-Miranda was arrested in Michigan by U.S. Marshalls. She was sentenced in May 2018 to 25 years followed by five years probation for a felony Attempted Murder in the case.