Left to right: Amelia Newell, Allison Newell, and Evalynn Newell (GoFundMe).
Three children in Indiana are dead after their mother killed them all along with herself late last summer, authorities recently announced.
On September 17, 2024, the Wolcottville Police Department received a request to check on someone’s well-being. Officers went to a residence on South Main Street in a small town located about 40 miles north of Fort Wayne.
Inside, were the four dead bodies.
As per a recent report from the Noble County Coroner obtained by local CBS affiliate WANE and ABC, NBC, and MyNetworkTV affiliate WPTA, 32-year-old Rebecca Hughes passed away by suicide.
That day, the mother of three murdered each of her young daughters: Evelyn Newell, 8, Allison Newell, 6, and Amelia Newell, 5.
All four died from inert gas asphyxiation, the coroner’s office said.
No other details about the deaths have been provided as of this writing.
The father of the slain children, however, had long surmised that his little girls were victims of a homicide.
Jonathan Newell expressed emotional thoughts in an interview with WPTA last year, sharing his distress with questions like ‘Why did this happen?’ He mentioned concerns if the supervised visitations he had with his kids had contributed to this tragic event, pondering if such limited and monitored visits were the reason behind these unfortunate circumstances.
The grieving father went on to say he hoped the memory of his children, highlighted by the occasion of their too-soon deaths, would be used to promote increased awareness and treatment of mental health.
“We need better access to it,” Newell said. “And there need to be more resources for moms and kids.”
During the interview, the father said he had mentally been prepared for losing his kids due to their mother’s actions.
“I had prepared myself, I think, that she had ran with the kids,” Newell went on. “She didn’t show up. She’d done some other stuff that would sort of indicate that she wasn’t gonna, you know, go along with it.”
Finally, when he had just decided to leave and visit the house where his children lived, he found two detectives waiting at his doorstep.
In a GoFundMe, Newell raised some $47,000 for their funeral within less than a week. He ultimately asked people to stop donating.
“I don’t ask people for help, but these kids deserve so much more than I can provide for their burials,” the girls’ father wrote. “Rebecca, their mom, took them with her when she passed on.”
