Six months after a child’s death was ruled accidental, Atlanta police have arrested the mother’s boyfriend and charged him with murder.
Medical officials arrived at the Harwell Place Apartments on June 8 with one thing in mind: saving McKenzie Duffey.
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The 1-year-old was falling in and out of consciousness that morning and at one point stopped breathing, Atlanta police said. But it was too late. Medical examiners ruled the death accidental.
It was an open and shut case — or so it seemed.
A month after McKenzie died, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled her death a homicide as a result of blunt force trauma to the torso.
Now, Garcia Duffey’s boyfriend, Michael Reynolds, is in the Fulton County jail on a child cruelty and murder charge. Authorities did not say Wednesday what caused the blunt force trauma, but Duffey told police McKenzie was alert and breathing the morning of the murder before she left for work.
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Duffey told police McKenzie had been sick a few times in the month leading up to her murder but that each time she took her daughter to the hospital doctors said they could find nothing wrong.
The last time McKenzie was there — two days before her death — doctors treated her only for a blister on the bottom of her foot, Duffey told police.
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