A man has been arrested and charged in the September killing of his girlfriend’s 1-year-old daughter, according to D.C. police.
D.C. police said that 1-year-old Journee Moore of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, died on Sept. 28, 2024, shortly before 11 p.m. when police responded to a report of a “child in cardiac arrest.”
DC crime news
According to court documents obtained by WTOP, responding officers said that when they arrived, Journee was “unconscious and unresponsive” in the lobby area of the Sedgwick Gardens Apartment building with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend Wayne Blake, 24, of Northwest, D.C.
Police said Blake was attempting to perform CPR on Journee when they got there.
The girl was taken to an area hospital where she was pronounced dead around 11:30 p.m., police said in a news release.
According to court documents, Blake told police he and Journee’s mother “stepped out of the bedroom for like 5-10 minutes” and when he came back to check on Journee, she was “balled up on the floor.”
He said that’s when he started performing CPR because “she was limp,” according to the documents.
Blake told police that Journee’s mother “wanted to call for an ambulance,” but he did not. When they arrived at the hospital, police said Blake “suggested” that Journee “suffocated on a pillow.”
On Sept. 29, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for D.C. determined the child suffered “multiple blunt force injuries” including rib, skull and face fractures as well as brain bleeding and a liver laceration at various stages of healing.
Her death was ruled a homicide.
On Thursday, Blake was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, felony murder and cruelty to children.
D.C. police said that the investigated revealed that the girl’s death was “domestic in nature.”
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