Article by y Shaun Robinson, VT Digger Apr 1 2022
A Tennessee man was arrested Friday on a second-degree murder charge in connection with the 2016 death of his daughter due to complications from an intentional injury she sustained as a 1-month-old in Vermont, Vermont State Police said.
Jason Roberts, 44, is being held in Tennessee pending his extradition to Vermont to face the charge, according to a state police press release.
Vermont State Police said Roberts was previously charged with first-degree aggravated domestic assault in Orleans County Superior Court in 2001 after he was accused of shaking his infant daughter, Destiny Roberts, at their home in Derby, according to a police affidavit filed in support of the murder charge.
The baby — who was later adopted and named Madison Simoneau — suffered “severe” brain injuries from shaken baby syndrome, according to the affidavit, resulting in quadriplegia, a seizure disorder and blindness in one eye. She required medical care up until her death.
Roberts pleaded no contest to the domestic assault charge in 2002 and was sentenced to four to 15 years in prison, according to the affidavit. He was released in 2011.
Madison died in July 2016 at Boston Children’s Hospital when she was 15 years old, state police said. The Massachusetts Office of the Chief Medical Examiner conducted an autopsy and found her death to be a homicide caused by “‘complications of remote acceleration/deceleration of the head’ (traumatic brain injury),” according to the affidavit.
Officials began investigating her death the following year, they said.
Throughout multiple interviews, police “asked if anyone had witnessed or were aware of any injuries (Madison) suffered aside from the injury caused by Jason Roberts, and no one reported any significant incidents or injuries that would have affected the trajectory of her life,” they wrote.
Over the past two years, a Vermont State Police detective re-interviewed Roberts — who denied causing Madison’s injuries — and sought the expert opinion of a doctor, according to the affidavit.
Although Roberts admitted to shaking his daughter in a 2001 interview with Vermont State Police, he later claimed that Madison was kicked in the head by a roommate who temporarily lived with Roberts, Madison and the girl’s mother, Tammy Hildreth.
But James Metz, the doctor who reviewed thousands of pages of documents on the police’s behalf, found it to be “highly unlikely” Madison’s head injuries stemmed from blunt force trauma, such as a kick. Metz, division chief of child abuse medicine at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital, said the girl’s injuries were “much more consistent with a whiplash type, shaking injury,” noting she had no bruising on her face or body that would suggest she had been kicked.
Metz delivered his opinion to investigators in August 2021, police said.
A warrant for Roberts’ arrest was issued on Thursday and he was taken into custody on Friday by the Blount County Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Marshals Service in Maryville, Tennessee, according to Vermont State Police.
Police did not indicate a date for his extradition. An email sent Friday evening to Orleans County State’s Attorney Jennifer Barrett was not returned.
Madison was adopted by Tim and Tammy Simoneau in 2003, according to the affidavit and a Facebook post from the Vermont State Employees’ Association. Tim Simoneau was a corrections worker and child abuse prevention advocate who died in 2016, according to the post. The Simoneaus began fostering Madison in August 2001, it says.
The couple said at the time that child abuse prevention was important to them because they had seen Madison’s injuries and never wanted them to happen to another child.
Alan J. Keays and Maggie Cassidy contributed to this report.