A man in Indiana will not face trial for the death of a 1-year-old girl, whose remains were discovered hidden inside a dresser at an abandoned house, Hoosier State prosecutors announced this week.
According to a plea agreement obtained by Law&Crime, Roan Waters, 27, will plead guilty to one count of neglect resulting in death and two counts of neglect of a dependent for Oaklee Snow’s death and endangerment.
The agreement will eliminate the possibility of other, more serious crimes occurring.
In March 2023, Waters was arrested at a Colorado hotel on an Oklahoma bench warrant. He was initially charged with several counts, including murder, neglect of a dependent resulting in death, neglect of a dependent resulting in serious injury, battery resulting in bodily injury to a person under 14, and neglect of a dependent.
Waters signed a plea agreement offered by the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office on May 22. The judge accepted the defendant’s plea on Wednesday, and he will be sentenced on June 13.
Waters’ trial was originally scheduled to begin on May 12, with Oaklee’s mother, Madison Marshall, expected to testify against him.
In January 2023, Oaklee, who was just shy of two years old at the time, was whisked away from Oklahoma to Indianapolis with her 7-month-old brother. Prosecutors claimed Marshall and Waters were the perpetrators. Both children were reported missing by their father, Zachary Snow.
Snow told investigators with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Oklahoma that Marshall and Waters took his son and daughter from their home on Jan. 19, 2023, without his permission, and fled to Indiana, where they would stay with Waters’ mother.
However, somewhere along the way, and under still murky circumstances, the young girl was murdered and her body hidden.
While the young boy was eventually reunited with his father after being discovered abandoned in what authorities described as a “trap house,” which is common terminology for a house dedicated to illegal drug use, Oaklee’s body would not be recovered for months.
A national search for the 2-foot-tall, 35-pound, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl ended in late April 2023, when Marshall, who was in custody, led authorities to an abandoned Morgantown home where Oaklee’s tortured and broken body was stuffed into a dresser.
Marshall told investigators that Waters would frequently “whoop” Oaklee as a form of discipline for any perceived misbehavior, such as “holding a fork wrong,” urinating in her diaper, and a variety of other common toddler behaviors. A probable cause affidavit alleges that the man “choked her out” on several occasions.
She also allegedly told investigators that Oaklee stopped eating around Waters because “he regularly became aggressive with her when she would not eat at the pace that he wanted her to,” according to police.
Marshall told detectives that the fatal day was February 9, 2023.
The girl’s mother stated that she overheard Waters repeatedly yelling at Oaklee to bounce on an inflatable rubber ball with a handle. Marshall went in to check on them after the “fifth and loudest time that he yelled at her,” and said she saw Waters “standing over Oaklee as she sat trying to bounce on the ball,” according to the affidavit.
Marshall claimed she saw Waters sit on the couch as she returned to the kitchen. Minutes later, she claimed she heard Waters scream for her daughter, saying she had “never heard a sound like that before.”
“She met him in the hallway as he held Oaklee in his arms,” the affidavit states. “She noticed that Oaklee wasn’t moving. R. Waters repeatedly stated without prompting that he ‘didn’t do anything’ and that ‘it wasn’t [his] fault.’ He initially refused to let Marshall take Oaklee from him, stripping her naked. Marshall could see Oaklee’s stomach and chest cavity expand, as if she were trying to breathe. However, when she tried to exhale, she noticed a mixture of blood and spittle dripping from her mouth, resulting in a gurgling sound. Oaklee’s eyes remained closed the entire time.
The girl was most likely dead or dying by that point, but Waters allegedly refused to let the child’s mother call 911, according to Marshall. Instead, Waters wrapped Oaklee in a blanket and placed her in the back of his car with Marshall, according to the affidavit. Marshall went on to tell police that she opened the blanket to check on her daughter and discovered Oaklee had stopped breathing — her lips had turned blue.
“Marshall felt her skin, which now seemed cool to the touch,” the affidavit continues. “She could no longer feel her heartbeat while holding her. Marshall pulled Oaklee’s eyelids back to examine her more closely, but they showed no movement or response. She took Oaklee’s hand and eventually climbed to the front seat next to R. Waters.”
Marshall, who was described as “hysterical and sobbing,” said she and Waters drove to the abandoned house together. He allegedly took Oaklee’s body out of the car, entered through a window, and emerged shortly thereafter, alone.
Oaklee’s decomposed body was discovered in the dresser’s bottom drawer. Police stated that her left leg had been “clearly broken at the knee, so that the left foot rested directly over her chest.” In June 2023, the Morgan County Coroner’s Office determined she died from a “homicide of unspecified means.”
Now, Waters will spend 45 years in prison.
According to the terms of the plea agreement, the defendant will be sentenced to the maximum punishment for each of the three counts, which will be assessed consecutively. The prosecutor’s office spokesperson told Law&Crime that the court has the discretion to impose additional sentencing terms.
Marshall accepted a plea deal in late April and formalized it earlier this week. Her sentencing date is also set for June 13.