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Mommy Dearest: Toddler Found Dead After Mother Leaves Her Alone for Over a Week

True Crime Nightmares
6 min readJan 6, 2025

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Jailyn Candelario

On the morning of June 16, 2023, a 911 dispatcher in Cleveland, Ohio received a panicked call from a woman asking them to send someone quick, something was wrong with her baby. First responders would later describe what they encountered inside the home as something straight out of a nightmare.

The woman who had placed the call for help, thirty-two-year-old Kristel Candelario, told members of the police and fire department’s rescue squad that she had awakened to find that her sixteen-month-old daughter Jailyn had stopped breathing.

An examination of the toddler, who was beyond resuscitation, immediately cast doubt on her story. It was clear to paramedics that the child had been dead for longer than a few hours. In their estimation, she had passed away 24–48 hours prior. To their horror, when they opened her mouth, they saw that it was filled with human excrement.

A look around the home had given police and paramedics a grim insight into Jailyn’s last days on earth. Though the baby was dressed in a clean outfit, it appeared that she hadn’t been bathed in days. The 2 ft. by 3 ft. playpen where she had obviously been confined for a lengthy period of time was soaked in urine and feces.

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True Crime Nightmares
True Crime Nightmares

Written by True Crime Nightmares

Author, victim advocate, true crime historian.

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