Authorities said Thursday that a woman in Louisiana is accused of killing her boyfriend’s 6-year-old daughter and putting the child’s body in a 10-gallon plastic bucket and leaving it on the yard of the child’s real mother.
Hannah Landon, who is 43 and from Harahan, was arrested on Wednesday. Her name in the jail records for Jefferson County Parish is written as “Bunnak Landon.” Landon was found around 2 p.m. CDT on Thursday at a nearby hospital. He was then taken to the parish jail. She is being charged with first-degree murder and trying to stop the law from being done.
WVUE-TV said that Landon is suspected of killing Bella Fontenelle, who was in kindergarten at St. Matthew the Apostle Catholic School in River Ridge.
WWL-TV reported that the Jefferson Parish Coroner Gerry Cvitanovich said that an initial autopsy found that the person died from “manual strangulation and blunt force injuries to the head.”
“I want to add that Bella’s body was whole and that, despite what people think, it was not cut up in any way,” Cvitanovich said. “We’re not happy about doing this. It’s hard to see and even harder to forget.”
NOLA.com reported that Lopinto said detectives think the child was killed at her father’s house and then taken to her mother’s house where she was taken out of a wagon.
Lopinto told reporters that investigators do not think Fontenelle’s real parents had anything to do with the murder.
WVUE reported that the girl’s father told Lopinto around 7:30 a.m. CDT on Wednesday that Landon and his younger daughter were missing after he woke up and found that they were not at home.
WDSU-TV said that detectives found that the man’s other child was at home and was safe. After looking into the father’s home, police went to Fontenelle’s real mother’s house, which is a block away, the TV station said.
NOLA.com reported that Lopinto said police found the girl’s body in a closed 10-gallon bleach bucket on the front yard of her mother.
Ken Livaudais, 67, lives on the same street as Fontenelle’s mother. According to the news outlet, his security cameras caught a woman pulling a wagon with a white bucket on it around 9:35 p.m. CDT on Tuesday. She was going toward the home of the birth mother.
“It makes me sick to my stomach to think that she was pulling a baby in a bucket,” Livaudais told NOLA.com.
Police haven’t made any guesses about why the child might have died.
WWL said that Landon went to court on Thursday, where a judge said she should be held without bond.
“Our town is small. Harahan Police Chief Ed Lepre said at a news gathering, “We’re a safe town, and I just want our residents to know that my heart and prayers go out to the family of this child.” “This is a stupid thing that happened, but the Harahan Police Department and the sheriff’s office will be there for the family,” he said.
Fontenelle was a friendly child who often rode her bike to a nearby river or played with her 7-year-old sister, NOLA.com said. Neighbors and friends called her “an itty-bitty princess.”
“Kids dying is always awful. “It’s not right that things like this happened,” Cvitanovich said. “In all honesty, it affects all of us.”
