An Ohio mother who claimed her baby merely fell out of bed has been charged with murder three years after the infant died from catastrophic head injuries.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced Friday that Daisha Somers, 27, was taken into custody near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, following a 10-count felony indictment handed down by a Hocking County grand jury earlier this week.
The arrest marks a grim milestone in an investigation that began on November 20, 2022. That Sunday, Somers and her boyfriend, Jerry K. Johnson IV, brought Somers’ 10-month-old daughter, Ka’myla, to the Hocking Valley Community Hospital emergency room.
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According to the Hocking County Sheriff’s Office, the couple claimed they heard a “loud thud” in the early morning hours and discovered the child had fallen from her toddler bed. However, medical staff immediately recognized that the child’s condition did not match the parents’ story.
Ka’myla was not breathing on her own and required life support to stay alive. She was airlifted to Nationwide Children’s Hospital Trauma Center in Columbus, where doctors uncovered the extent of the violence she had suffered.
Investigators say the fall from a toddler bed was a fabrication. The infant had suffered approximately seven skull fractures, retinal hemorrhages, stomach bleeding, and multiple strokes. She had also endured prolonged cardiac arrest.
Detectives noted that neither Somers nor Johnson called 911. Instead, they waited several hours before driving the unresponsive child to the hospital in a personal vehicle.
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During initial interviews, the timeline of events shifted. While the couple first blamed a fall, Johnson later changed his story, claiming he found the child unresponsive while Somers was doing laundry elsewhere. Both admitted to substance use at the time; Somers confessed to smoking methamphetamine, while Johnson admitted to using marijuana and alcohol.
Ka’myla never recovered. On November 23, 2022, after showing no signs of brain activity, she was taken off life support and pronounced dead.
The case, investigated by the Sheriff’s Office and the Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s Special Victims Unit, culminated this week in a grand jury indictment.
Somers is now facing two counts of unclassified felony murder, along with charges of involuntary manslaughter, felonious assault, corrupting another with drugs, aggravated possession of drugs, and four counts of endangering children.
Authorities from the Mason County Sheriff’s Office and West Virginia State Police apprehended Somers on Friday. She is currently being held at the Western Regional Jail in Barboursville, awaiting extradition to Ohio.
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