Last Thursday, August 24, a newborn baby was found in the same apartment building of where a missing Fargo, North Dakota pregnant woman vanished from on August 19. That pregnant woman, Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, was reported dead after kayakers found her body on Sunday, August 27.
Fargo police say that 22-year-old LaFontaine-Greywind, who was eight months pregnant, vanished from her family’s apartment after a neighbor asked her to help with sewing a dress, and that her body was found “heavily wrapped in plastic and duct tape” in the Red River in North Dakota, not far from Fargo.
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LaFontaine-Greywind’s upstairs neighbors, Brooke Lynn Crews, 38, and William Henry Hoehn, 32, were arrested on Thursday after police found a newborn baby, who is believed to be LaFontaine-Greywind’s, in their apartment with Crews. Although multiple searches of Crews and Hoehn’s home had been conducted before, the baby was not found until Thursday.
On Monday, after LaFontaine-Greywind’s body was found, authorities said the suspects would also each face a charge of conspiracy to commit murder. Both Hoehn and Crews are jailed without bond. They have not yet entered pleas to the charges against them. It is unclear at this time whether they have attorneys.
Hoehn has allegedly told police that he came home on August 19 to find Crews cleaning up blood in the bathroom.
She was also holding a baby girl and allegedly told him, “This is our baby, this is our family.”
At this point, police say it’s unclear how LaFontaine-Greywind was killed and how she gave birth, if DNA results do indeed confirm the child’s identity as hers. (Results are expected to be revealed later this week.)
LaFontaine-Greywind’s mother, Norberta Greywind, told PEOPLE that her family has been living at the apartment building for a year. She remembers that a week before her daughter went missing, Crews had allegedly tried to lure her to her third-floor apartment.
“[Crews] had come down a week prior to this trying to get my daughter to come upstairs,” Greywind said. “I feel like I have a lot of guilt for not seeing this [coming] and not protecting my daughter. I didn’t think that she was in danger, I didn’t think anything like [this] could’ve happen.”
Greywind, who says she has only seen photos of the newborn baby while the child’s identity is being confirmed, says her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, Ashton Matheny, had already named the baby girl Haisley Jo, and that she was due September 20.
“All I wanted was a life with Savanna and my baby, but they took it from me,” Matheny told the Forum News Service last week, before LaFontaine-Greywind’s body was found. “My world’s gone, man. They took my world from me.”
On not being able to see the newborn, who according to the Forum News Service, is being held at a local hospital in custody of social services, Matheny said, “It breaks my heart. They’re admitting it’s [our] baby. I guarantee if I saw it, I could tell whose child is. It doesn’t matter what I think. They have guidelines and procedures.”
LaFontaine-Greywind’s mother says she will tell the baby “that her mom loved her and wanted her [and] we were all excited and her mom was a wonderful person [with a] big heart.”
“She loved everyone, she loved kids, her family — she would have been a wonderful mom,” Greywind says.
