A Time for Change

According to CNN, 28 year old Sunday school teacher and young mother, Melissa Huckaby, was charged with additional crimes, including attempting poison a child and “Daniel Plowman.”  She is also charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering 8 year old Sandra Cantu.  

The new charges caused another delay in the murder case, CNN afiliate KRON reported.

The complaint charged that Huckaby “did willfully and unlawfully mingle a harmful substance with food or drink” with the intent to harm the child, identified only as “Jane M. Doe.”

Another alleged poisoning victim was identified as Daniel Plowman, but no age or other information was immediately provided.

The latest charges also include one count of child abuse endangerment relating to the unidentified child, who was allegedly in Huckaby’s “care and custody.” Read the complaint (PDF)

The Daily Beast has provided some additional details about “Daniel Plowman,” who is one of the new victims namedin the complaint.  

What we now know is that prosecutors believe Huckaby on March 2 drugged a 36-year-old man named Daniel Plowman, who lives in Hayward, a town about 40 miles west of Tracy. It was late that night when she allegedly mixed “a harmful substance with food or drink with the intent that the same be taken by a human being,” according to the amended criminal complaint file this week. Hours later, at about 1:30 a.m. the next day, Plowman was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. He had pulled his car into the drive-through of a McDonald’s about five minutes away from Huckaby’s mobile home. He ordered some food and paid for it just before passing out on the wheel, according to an employee who called police about the incident. When he came to, still disoriented, he drove into a wall. Police showed up and towed his gold-colored Ford Tempo. They took him into custody, but later released him and never pressed charges. I couldn’t track Plowman down for comment, but I heard from neighbors that he dated Huckaby for a while.

So she was drugging boyfriends too?  As for the other little girl, the police have more or less acknowledged that they could have been better about investigating that incident and then maybe Sandra cantu might still be alive.

Huckaby allegedly took her 5-year-old daughter Madison’s playmate out “to the park.” They were gone for four hours, the girl’s mother, Lora Polk, 41, told me. So Polk called the police, who searched everywhere, but the search ended when Huckaby appeared back at Polk’s home and dropped the girl off.

Relieved, Polk hugged her daughter, then took her to get some dinner at a local fast-food joint. But on the way there, the girl started slumping over. She slurred her words.

“Something wasn’t right,” Polk said. “So I rushed her to the hospital.”

Polk nervously waited in the lobby at the nearby hospital for doctors to come back with the results. About five hours after Polk admitted her daughter, she says doctors told her they found benzodiazepine coursing through the little girl’s body. They called the police, who questioned Polk, who accused her of supplying the pills to her daughter but evidently ended the night without an arrest.

Huckaby had said that the cops questioned her in connection to that case. And Polk offered for detectives to search her own home. But police said they just couldn’t form a strong enough case to file charges against anyone. Polk said they called her up after Sandra Cantu’s disappearance to express their regrets that they couldn’t have resolved the mysterious drugging incident back then. Cops didn’t even test the 7-year-old girl for signs of sexual assault until after Huckaby’s arrest—months after the suspect allegedly took the child, who said Huckaby gave her water that “tasted funny,” “like medicine,” said her mother.

This week, it became clear that whatever evidence prosecutors found against Huckaby in regards to the drugging incident was enough to file an amended complaint.

The tragedy is that it was several months too late for Sandra Cantu.