The parents of a 4-year-old girl from Missouri who was allegedly killed by neighbors to remove a ‘demon’, pleaded not guilty to charges in the case
COLE CAMP, Ma. The parents of a 4-year-old Missouri girl who was allegedly killed by neighbors to remove a ‘demon’ pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges related to the case.
Mary S. Mast, 29, and James A. Mast, 28, both of Lincoln, Missouri, were charged Thursday with the threat of child threats leading to death and are being jailed without jail time. They do not yet have lawyers.
Judge Mark Brandon Pilley, deputy judge, also denied the couple’s request to attend the girl’s funeral during their court proceedings on Monday, according to online court records. A trial is scheduled for January 5.
The couple’s other children, a 2-year-old boy and a baby, have been placed in protective custody, Benton County Sheriff Eric Knox said in a news release.
The girl was found dead in the family home on December 20. Knox said she was badly beaten and plunged into an icy dam as part of a ‘religious episode’.
Across the road neighbors Ethan Mast, 35, and Kourtney Aumen, 21, were charged last week with second-degree murder and other offenses. Both are sent to jail unrelated. It is believed that Ethan Mast is not related to James and Mary Mast, Knox said.
Both families live in the same church, but Knox said the actions the girl was involved in were not approved by the church, which he declined to name.
“The investigation that has been done so far indicates that this is an isolated incident and NOT the actions of a cult,” Knox wrote in a news release on the department’s Facebook page.
A probable cause statement from Benton County Sgt. Chris Wilson said the girl was already dead and had severe purple bruises all over her body, as well as burst blisters, when he was called to the home.
Knox said the girl’s parents were also beaten along with the 2-year-old. The baby is unharmed.
James Mast told investigators he and his wife observed the slaughter of their daughter, but said they would be beaten or shot if they tried to intervene.
Yet Wilson asked James Mast “how he can get people to do this to his family, and he said they said (his wife) has a ‘devil’ in her and her children will end up just like her if it doesn’t not be cared for, ”Wilson wrote in the probable cause statement.
Ethan Mast told investigators that he and Aumen used a leather strap to hit the girl on Dec. 19, the statement said. She was then taken to a pond behind the house where she was ‘immersed’ in water on a day when high temperatures were in the 40s.
Ethan Mast said everyone then returned to the victims’ home. It was not clear when the child died.
Benton County, with about 19,000 inhabitants, is 161 miles southeast of Kansas City, Missouri.