The mother in Michigan who was charged with beating and killing her 3-year-old son and then hiding the body in a freezer pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on July 12.
The Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney’s office told PEOPLE that Azuradee France, 33, agreed to a sentence of 35 to 60 years in prison for the death of Chayse Allen as part of a settlement deal.
Wayne County officials say that France’s other charges of first-degree child abuse, torture, and hiding a death will be dropped when he is sentenced on July 29.
The Detroit News says France told cops that she kicked the boy in the chest because he wouldn’t eat. When she went to check on him in the morning, he wasn’t making any noise. The News says she told police she didn’t call 911 because she was afraid the cops would take her other children away.
Following that, she froze the boy’s body. Three months later, his body was found after Child Protective Services got a call from someone they didn’t know.
France was questioned by police when they went to her house. “It was determined that the 3-year-old child was deceased in his home in the basement and sadly found in a freezer,” Detroit Police Chief James White said at a press conference in June 2022, after France was arrested. “This case has shocked me, it’s shocked our investigators, but the discovery would not have been possible without the officers’ intuition.”
“Think about what the other kids must have been through and what they must have had to deal with in that house.” White said, “Yes, a child was already dead and yes, a child was found in the freezer.”
“They recognized that there was something not right about the conversation and the way this occupant was communicating with them,” White said. He said France was acting strangely and responding in a way that was meant to “push the officers away as if nothing was going on.”
Yet “their intuition and their experience led them to know that something was wrong,” he said.
