Murder charges filed against father of 3-month-old found in sealed bucket
Plus, Indiana House candidate Jim Schenke makes brief appearance before walking out of Election Board hearing into violations connected to his campaign RV. Plus, Ice Cream Crawl passport winners
Eliasard Moneus, accused of killing his 3-month-old son, Jacob, by putting him in a sealed laundry detergent bucket last weekend, was charged with murder Thursday.
Moneus, 28, appeared in a Tippecanoe County courtroom, where the murder charge and four others were read to him by Magistrate Sarah Wyatt, via a Haitian Creole interpreter.
Moneus said told Wyatt he understood the charges, which also include attempted murder, aggravated battery and domestic battery with a deadly weapon for a beating investigators say he gave his wife with a tire iron or tool from his vehicle. He also faces a charge of criminal confinement in connection with his son’s death.
But he said through his interpreter that when she mentioned killing someone, he didn’t know about that.
Wyatt entered a not guilty plea for Moneus and ordered that he be held without bond until a trial, tentatively set for January 2025. She also issued a no contact order for Moneus to not communicate with his wife.
Court documents filed Thursday did not reveal much more than Tippecanoe County prosecutors had included in a probable cause affidavit Monday. Then, they said Jacob Moneus, a 3-month-old Lafayette boy who was the subject of a Silver Alert search Saturday, was found by police Sunday morning in an orange, snap-seal bucket next to a kitchen trash can in his family’s apartment on Lexington Court.
Preliminary results of an autopsy done Monday showed that Jacob died of asphyxia.
According to Monday’s court filing, police started investigating Saturday afternoon after Jacob’s mother drove herself to IU Arnett Hospital for wounds she told officers came from Moneus, the father of Jacob and her husband of 11 months.
According to the prosecutor’s account, she told police that Moneus got upset with her on Aug. 5 and left, and that the two hadn’t spoken until he arrived at the apartment on Lexington Court on Saturday. She told police she was in the apartment watching a church service on TV with Jacob when Moneus came in and took the child. She said Moneus returned about a half-hour later, came into a bedroom and struck her several times with a tire iron or a wrench. She wound up with a fractured skull, police said.
According to the court filing, she told police she did not know where Jacob was. Police searched the apartment Saturday but could not find him.
Indianapolis police found Eliasard Moneus in an apartment complex in Lawrence later that day. At the Tippecanoe County Jail, according to the court filing, Moneus admitted that he’d hit his wife two or three times with the tool from his vehicle and had hoped she’d die from the injuries.
According to the court filing, Moneus told police that Jacob was at the apartment when the battery happened. He told officers that the child was OK, but he did not offer any other details about where he was, according to the court filing. Police issued a statewide Silver Alert Saturday night, saying that Jacob had been abducted.
Police found the child at the apartment, in the sealed bucket, the following morning.
SCHENKE SHOWS UP FOR ELECTION VIOLATION HEARING … LONG ENOUGH TO DROP OFF CEASE AND DESIST LETTER
Defying a court summons to appear before the Tippecanoe County Election Board, Jim Schenke – Republican candidate for the Indiana House District 26 seat – stormed into the meeting room just long enough mid-meeting Thursday to drop off a three-page letter calling on election officials to cease and desist what he called unlawful harassment and defamation.
The three Election Board members barely broke stride on a hearing about alleged election law violations regarding a campaign RV/billboard, as Schenke walked out of the County Office Building’s Tippecanoe Room without uttering a word.
Later, Schenke told Based in Lafayette that he wasn’t sticking around for what he dubbed a kangaroo court.
“They do not have any legal authority to be doing anything that they've been doing, and I will not sanction or support their illicit politically motivated efforts by my participation,” Schenke said.
The Election Board found that handwritten paid-for disclaimers on Schenke’s 32-foot RV – essentially wrapped as a rolling billboard for his campaign – didn’t meet their interpretation for clear and conspicuous.
In emails and conversations with media, Schenke has protested, saying the county election staff is singling him when state election officials should be the ones determining state candidates’ compliance on fliers, yard signs and other campaign materials. Schenke didn’t appear for the June meeting, saying he was out of town on a personal matter.
But he pointed to handwritten notes on three sides of the RV that it was “Paid for by Jim4Indiana” he contends were there as soon as he had the vehicle marked like a campaign billboard ahead of the May 2024 primary. State law, which gives minimum font size standards for yard signs and printed materials, relies on a more vague “conspicuous” standard on billboards – which is one description Schenke used to describe his RV in campaign finance paperwork.
The county got a court summons for Schenke to appear for Thursday’s hearing. When Schenke went to court to try to block that, a judge ruled that the county Election Board was in bounds and he needed to show up.
Schenke made his brief appearance about five minutes into the hearing, which was proceeding without him.
While Schenke claimed he’d not been given due process since he was called out about disclaimers on his campaign materials earlier this summer, county election staff presented a list of emails back and forth with him about the issue. Those included offers to drop the hearing if Schenke worked with the office to put what the county considered adequate and conspicuous signage on his RV and on printed materials he’d been handing out since the Tippecanoe County 4-H Fair in July.
The Election Board voted 3-0 that the disclaimers on the RV – in one case, smaller than the Unleaded Gasoline Only label next to the gas cap – were an election law violation. Board members declined to issue a fine in the case, saying it would just add to the time election office staff have spent on the situation if they had to pursue payment, too. They also declined to send the matter to the prosecutor for his consideration of a misdemeanor charge. The Election Board, instead, sent the case to the Indiana Election Division, where Schenke insisted it should have been, to see if state officials wanted to take a crack at it.
Election Board members also decided the letter Schenke dropped off didn’t offer up a defense against the election law violations allegations, instead falling back on accusations of ballot fraud and other election integrity issues he’s floated – and that county officials have rejected as false – during his campaign. He contended that county election officials, specifically County Clerk Julie Roush, had spent more time hassling him than dealing with what he argued were potential cases of local voter fraud.
“These charges are spurious and false,” Kent Moore, the Democratic member of the Election Board, said.
Here’s more on Schenke’s campaign and his test of wills with the Tippecanoe County Election Board, from Thursday morning’s edition of Based in Lafayette:
THIS AND THAT/OTHER READS …
JUDGE DISMISSES PROFESSORS’ CHALLENGE OF SB202 PROVISIONS: A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a challenge of Indiana’s new “intellectual diversity” requirements on state campuses, part of Senate Bill 202’s higher education reforms. The ACLU of Indiana had filed a lawsuit aimed at Purdue, challenging the potential consequences of “incredibly ambiguous terms” contained in Indiana’s new tenure review and other higher education reforms meant to promote what lawmakers called “intellectual diversity” on the state’s college campuses. The lawsuit in U.S. District Court was on behalf of two Purdue-Fort Wayne professors who contend the law’s provisions for disciplining instructors if they fail to “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity” or who don’t “expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks.” A pair of Indiana University professors got in on the lawsuit later. According to the lawsuit, the professors argued that the law left them guessing about what they can and can’t teach in their current courses without running up against provisions that could get them fired or keep them from being promoted. On Wednesday, federal Judge Sarah Evans Barker ruled that the professors’ allegations are “premature” because their universities haven’t finalized policies implementing the new law. Reacting Thursday, state Sen. Spencer Deery – a West Lafayette Republican who carried Senate Bill 202 – said: “I carefully crafted Indiana's new law to protect academic freedom, promote free speech and strengthen the quality of education Hoosiers receive. It was designed to withstand desperate measures from those who do not want to see changes in the culture and practices of higher education or who insist their narrow worldview is the only one that counts." For more on the ruling, Indiana Capital Chronicle’s Leslie Bonilla Muñiz had this account: “Judge dismisses professor ‘intellectual diversity’ lawsuit, calls claims ‘premature.’”
ICE CREAM CRAWL PASSPORT WINNERS: Congratulations to Based in Lafayette subscribers Ryan Anderson and Kelly B., winners of two family passports for Lafayette Rotary’s seventh annual Ice Cream Crawl from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 17. They were among more than 70 entries. (And I was the winner of finding a random number generator online to pick from that lot.) The Ice Cream Crawl offers a chance to visit any or all of nine participating Lafayette/West Lafayette ice cream shops for samples. Passports/tickets are $10 for individuals and $25 for families of five or fewer from the same household. Get passports here.
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"...state Sen. Spencer Deery – a West Lafayette Republican who carried Senate Bill 202 – said: “I carefully crafted Indiana's new law..." to be vague enough that professors will be subject to the whims of the far right.