After meeting the infant found earlier this month, Norberta Greywind is certain the child belongs to her daughter, Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, the 22-year-old pregnant North Dakota woman who was found dead in a river on Sunday.
“She is beautiful,” Greywind said of the baby in an interview with Valley News Live. Though DNA results are pending, the infant’s possible grandmother says the little girl looked just like her daughter, who was found dead on August 27.
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LaFontaine-Greywind’s boyfriend, Ashton Matheny, was also able to see the infant this week. He and his girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant the last time her family saw her, had planned to name their baby girl Haisley Jo.
“It was the best feeling I’ve ever had,” Matheny told The Bismarck Tribune. “I wish Savanna could have been there to enjoy it with me. After all these dark days, she lit my day right up.”
LaFontaine-Greywind disappeared on the afternoon of August 19 after an upstairs neighbor asked her for help with sewing a dress. She wasn’t seen of heard from after, but police found who they believed to be the pregnant woman’s newborn daughter with the neighbors.
William Henry Hoehn, 32, and Brooke Lynn Crews, 38, were then arrested on August 24 on charges of conspiracy to commit kidnapping in connection with LaFontaine-Greywind’s disappearance.
On Sunday, August 27, kayakers spotted the body in Red River near Harwood, North Dakota. Police said the woman’s remains were “heavily wrapped in plastic and duct tape.”
In the days that followed, police uncovered some chilling details about the case.
Hoehn allegedly told police that he arrived home on August 19 as Crews was 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.”
He allegedly told police he removed garbage bags with bloody towels and his bloody shoes from the home and left them in a dumpster in West Fargo, according to updated case documents.
Documents also state that Crews told detectives that she had invited LaFontaine-Greywind to her apartment where she taught the pregnant woman how to self-induce birth by breaking her own water. She says the 22-year-old gave her the baby on August 21, two days after she disappeared from the apartment.
As for the infant, DNA results will determine whether she is released to the LaFontaine-Greywind family. Those results should be released in the next few days.
Norberta Greywind 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 told PEOPLE. “She loved everyone, she loved kids, her family — she would have been a wonderful mom,” Greywind says.
