An Amish mother has been formally charged with the drowning of her 4-year-old son at Atwood Lake in Tascarawas County, Ohio, along with domestic violence and child endangerment charges related to her three older children.
The mother, who authorities have identified as 40-year-old Ruth R. Miller, insisted to investigators that she was seeking to obey God when she threw her son, Vincen, off the dock at the lake to give him to God on the morning of Aug. 23.
“It did not appear that the gravity of the situation had sunk in,” said Capt. Adam Fisher, lead investigator with the Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s Office, told the press last Wednesday, following interviews with the mother about her actions.
Sheriff Orvis L. Campbell of the Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s Office said that at about 10:39 a.m. on Aug. 23, they responded to an incident at Atwood Lake where a woman and three of her children — her 15-year-old daughter and her twin 18-year-old sons — crashed a golf cart next to Atwood Marina West.
“After helping the woman out of the water, the woman made concerning statements about conversing with God,” Campbell said in a press statement. “It was evident that the crash into the water was intentional by the mother.”
Campbell said the teenagers, who were visiting the lake for the weekend from Holmes County with their parents, managed to escape the crash unharmed. They raised concerns, however, about their 4-year-old brother and father, 45-year-old Marcus Miller, who also died at the lake trying to prove his worthiness to God.
“It became evident after piecing together numerous statements from the woman, the children, and other witnesses … that foul play was suspected,” Campbell said.
At around 6:03 p.m., divers found the body of Vincen Miller and his mother was hospitalized for “some mental health concerns” as they sought to locate Marcus Miller.
The following day, the Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s Office announced that they had found the father’s body near where they had found his son.
Ruth Miller told police that prior to her son’s drowning, she and her husband had visited Atwood Lake as part of a misguided test of faith in God.
“They jumped in the water because God was speaking to them and telling them to do things, things to prove their worthiness to God,” investigators explained.
Investigators say the mother told them she and her husband felt they had failed God. Even though her husband wasn’t a strong swimmer, he decided he would swim to a sandbar, but drowned.
“According to the [surviving teenage] children,” Campbell told Fox 8, “she [their mother] made them all lie down on the dock with their hands in the water, to pray for their little brother and father because they were gone.”
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