A Michigan woman whose young daughter was found dead in a garbage bag apparently told an investigator that the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants ordered her to kill the girl.
Justine Johnson, 22, said she hallucinated that the fictional character ordered her to kill her three-year-old daughter or that she herself would die while in heroin withdrawal.
Johnson allegedly stabbed Sutton Mosser multiple times on Sept. 16, 2021, before putting her body in a black garbage bag. The girl had just turned two days before her death.
The woman has been charged with felony murder and first degree child abuse.
On Friday, Ryan Eberline, a Child Protective Services investigator, testified during a preliminary hearing before Iosco County District Judge Christopher Marin, Michigan outlet MLive reported.
The officer, who interviewed Johnson on Oct. 1, 2021, said the woman had claimed she left her mother’s home in Oscoda, where she lived, and passed out in a cemetery the day the girl was killed.
“He told me that he did not remember the details of what happened at the time of what happened to Sutton, that he was experiencing hallucinations due to heroin withdrawal and not having slept for approximately two weeks,” Eberline told the court.
The investigator added: “She was having hallucinations of television that she was ordered to take her daughter’s life or she would be killed. It was SpongeBob who was saying these things on TV. If he didn’t do what he did to her daughter, they would kill her. She said that she feared for her life and that she had gone mad.”
Knesley Johnson Jr., the woman’s brother, said he didn’t notice anything unusual about his sister before he left for work that fateful day. When he returned on September 17, 2021, he asked his younger brother about Johnson and Sutton.
When the 17-year-old brother went looking for them, he saw a girl’s foot sticking out of a bag. The teen testified Friday that when he found her sister in the bathroom on Sept. 16, he saw her “taking lines” of what he perceived to be cocaine, though he wasn’t sure.
She added that Johnson asked her to “mind her own business” when she asked about the girl. She saw a foot sticking out of a garbage bag and informed her older brother about it.
Police found Sutton’s body wrapped in bedding and inside a garbage bag.
