Police- Woman wanted friend to feel loss of baby

SIKESTON, Mo. -- A Sikeston woman, arrested Thursday for killing the infant daughter of a friend, told investigators she wanted the child's mother to know what it was like to lose a baby.

According to a sworn statement from Department of Public Safety detective James Donner, Latoya Marie Fletcher, 22, confessed that she wanted to teach her friend a lesson when she put 5-month-old Octavia Clark face down on a piece of plastic Sept. 17.

Fletcher is charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the infant's death.

Fletcher spent the night with the baby's family and told police she had been trying to get Octavia's mother to understand what it felt like to lose a child.

Her own baby was killed in an accident in 1998.

On the night of the girl's death, she crept into the child's room between 4 and 7 a.m., and put her face-down on the plastic.

The little girl had been sleeping on a mattress with two other children and Fletcher said she tried to make it look like the baby had rolled off onto the plastic.

She told police she didn't mean for the infant to die, wanting just to frighten the mother.

In the probable cause affidavit, Donner wrote that Fletcher said the world is not a good place for anyone's baby and that Octavia was "living in a poor environment and she is better off in Heaven" with Fletcher's baby.