The mother of an 8-month-old boy who died of a fentanyl overdose at a Roseville hotel in 2022 has been charged with manslaughter.
Wynona Ann Littlewolf, 29, was charged by warrant Thursday in Ramsey County District Court with two counts of second-degree manslaughter in connection with her son’s death. Littlewolf, who is currently incarcerated at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Shakopee on a second-degree burglary conviction out of Cass County, was listed as a resident of Cass Lake, Minn.
Wynona Ann Littlewolf (Courtesy of the Minnesota Department of Corrections)
According to Thursday’s criminal complaint:
St. Paul police were sent to a business in the city’s St. Anthony Park neighborhood around 2:45 p.m. March 12, 2022, on a report of a baby who was blue, unconscious and not breathing. Medics responded and pronounced the boy dead. Medics said he was already in rigor mortis and his body seemed abnormally cold.
Littlewolf and her boyfriend said they had stayed overnight at the Roseville DoubleTree and found the boy was purple when they awoke in the afternoon. They left for a hospital, but stopped at the business for help after getting lost.
Littlewolf’s boyfriend, identified in the complaint as CM, told officers he had a traumatic brain injury and has trouble remembering details. He said they put the baby on his stomach in his crib and that he was blue and not breathing when they woke up. He said he uses marijuana, but no other drugs. He said Littlewolf uses heroin.
Littlewolf told officers they put her son to sleep in a crib between 3 and 4 a.m., and soon fell asleep. She said they didn’t check on the infant after waking up around noon. Once they discovered he was purple and not breathing, she said, they panicked and immediately left the hotel to get help.
Officers learned Littlewolf and CM had checked into the hotel on March 11 and were scheduled to check out two days later. Officers recovered drug paraphernalia from the room: a burnt piece of tin foil in the bathroom and a rolled-up dollar bill on the floor. Tests on both showed the presence of fentanyl. Littlewolf’s blood also tested positive for fentanyl.
An autopsy on her son concluded he died of fentanyl toxicity.
Littlewolf agreed to speak to investigators from prison on March 30, 2023. She said she, her son and CM had been the only people in the hotel room. She said her son was starting to eat solid foods and had just started crawling and standing up. She said he crawled on the hotel floor during their stay.
Littlewolf said she and CM had argued after dinner and so she went into the bathroom to calm down and smoke heroin. When she left the bathroom, she found CM and her son asleep on a bed. She moved the infant to his crib.
When shown a photo of the rolled-up dollar bill, Littlewolf gasped and said, “Oh my god,” the complaint states.
When asked if she was responsible for her son’s death, Littlewolf replied, “I think I should have been watching him more,” the complaint states. “Okay, I should have been, you know, I should have been watching him a lot more, but I pushed him off to [CM].”
Littlewolf has two other felony convictions, besides the one for burglary: felon in possession of a firearm/ammunition in February 2016 and possession of a fifth-degree controlled substance (methamphetamine) in November 2022.
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