An Ohio grand jury has indicted a Licking County man on 13 counts relating to the death of his 4-month-old daughter nearly three years ago.
Chance Terrence Topp is accused of forcefully holding a pacifier in his baby’s mouth, blocking her breathing, until she died.
Topp was initially charged last June with involuntary manslaughter in the child’s October 13, 2023, death, according to the Licking County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies were called to the home at about 7:30 p.m. that day, the sheriff’s office said, and took the baby to Licking Memorial Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
The new indictment was handed up last Wednesday and adds multple new charges, including aggravated murder and murder, to the docket, WBNS reports. Topp is also charged with endangering children, felonious assault, strangulation, reckless homicide, domestic violence, and falsification.
The indictment says that Topp initially told police he was asleep and heard the baby gasping for air. He tried to administer CPR, then ran out of the room to tell other people in the house what was going on, but he did not call 911.
An autopsy found that the infant died from asphyxia and had THC in her system. She also had a red mark on her neck and bruising on her jawline, but the coroner did not rule on a manner of death.
In the course of the lenghty investigation, Topp told detectives he had been smoking THC to “calm himself down” and that he supposedly had been watching the child while her mother was at work, court documents say
Family members reported that Topp was an inattentive father, preferring to play video games and drink alcohol to actually taking care of the infant. On the night in question, detectives determined, the baby had been crying, preventing him from sleeping, so he shoved a pacifier into her mouth forcefully holding it there, until she suffocated.
He is set to go on trial on July 27.
Featured image: Chance Topp/Licking County Sheriff’s Office
