Indictment: Missing girl was beaten, denied medical care

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BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 30, 2008

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AURORA — The last time Aarone Thompson’s stepbrother remembers his sister was when he heard her screams echoing through a vent from the basement of their house, waking him up in the middle of the night.

Other siblings described how little Aarone would be punished for wetting herself by being beaten or placed in a closet for hours at a time. Aarone would stick her fingers underneath the closet door, and a stepsister would touch them to comfort her.

The chilling testimony was contained in a 60-count indictment released Wednesday against Aarone’s father, Aaron Thompson, who faces charges of fatal child abuse, concealing a death for two years, assault with a deadly weapon and conspiracy.

Prosecutors believe Aarone may have died sometime in 2003 when she was 4 years old, but the couple was able to conceal her death for two years.

Aaron Thompson didn’t report Aarone missing until November 2005, when she would have been 6.

Aarone was one of eight children in the suburban Denver home who would be beaten daily by Thompson or his girlfriend, Shely Lowe, the indictment says.

The seven children, who are now in foster care, told investigators that Thompson and Lowe sometimes took them to the basement, ordered them to strip naked and “whooped” them with a baseball bat, belts, cords and a broomstick, often leaving scars, the 50-page indictment says. Some of the beatings were prompted by offenses such as “stealing” food.

Aarone’s stepbrother, then 11, told police that the girl’s screams one night stopped abruptly — and that he heard their father utter an expletive. He never saw or heard his stepsister again.

An exhaustive police and FBI search of the area failed to find the child.

The indictment alleges she may have been buried in a field. Thompson, jailed on $500,000 bond, has refused to cooperate with investigators.

Thompson’s trial is scheduled for June 16.

Shely Lowe was implicated in the indictment, but she died in May 2006 of heart problems.

Messages left for James O’Connor, Thompson’s public defender, were not immediately returned.

The indictment says the abuse took place between May 12, 2002, and Aug. 31, 2004. Children described how Aarone was beaten so many times that they lost count.

The last picture of Aarone that the family could provide investigators was taken during a 2002 vacation to the Grand Canyon.

She was not enrolled in school, even though at the time she was reported missing she would have been in the first grade.

Sometime in 2003, Thompson and Lowe told the other children that Aarone had moved to Michigan to live with her mother.

“After that if anyone asked about Aarone they would get cussed out,” investigators wrote.

Shortly after Aarone disappeared, children in the house described how Aarone’s mattress was moved to the garage and her belongings, including her clothes, were put in a bag and placed in the basement.

The indictment says Lowe told the father of one of her children in January 2004 that Aarone had stopped breathing in a bathtub and that when Thompson and Lowe couldn’t revive her, they buried her body in a “far away” field.

Lowe told the man that Aarone appeared to exhale her last breath as they covered her with dirt.

“They decided they would have to get rid of the body because there was a scar on her back from where they had disciplined her,” he indictment said.

The man told police he believed Aarone died in the summer or fall of 2003 and that Lowe’s main concern was that social services or police would take the other children away.

It wasn’t immediately clear why the man — and others Lowe spoke to, according to the document — didn’t report their conversations to police before Aarone was reported missing.

In 2004, for example, Lowe told a friend that Aarone had died and that she and Thompson were “thinking of different scenarios of how they were going to pull off Aarone not being there.”

She told her friend she might see an Amber Alert, which is a public alert system for missing children.
Aarone Thompson is still listed as missing by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Thompson reported his daughter missing on Nov. 14, 2005, telling police she had run away after an argument over a cookie.

Police launched their search, but by 9 p.m., Thompson told officers he was tired and wanted to go to bed, the indictment says.

“The temperature outside had dropped to about 30 degrees, it was snowing, and his daughter had not been found,” the indictment says.

The indictment was handed up in May 2007 but wasn’t made public until The Denver Post and The Associated Press filed suit to gain access under open records laws.

It alleges that besides the repeated beatings, Aarone suffered from undernourishment and hadn’t been given medical care.