Verona couple makes pleas in death of child

A Verona couple has made pleas to the charges they were facing in the death of a three-year-old boy.

Caleb Edward Williams, 26, made an Alford plea to two counts of endangering the welfare of a child; under his plea agreement, he faces up to eight years in prison. Sarah Lynn Garbee, 27, pleaded guilty to one count of endangering the welfare of a child; she faces up to seven years in prison, but could serve as little as 120 days of shock time. Both made their pleas on Monday, May 24.

According to the probable cause statement, the body of the boy, identified as Sarah Garbee’s son RMG, was autopsied at Cox South Hospital on July 25, 2019, about a day after he died. The autopsy determined that the cause of the boy’s death was a rupture in his small intestine, caused by blunt force trauma. The hole in the boy’s small intestine was about the size of a quarter.
Detectives from the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office interviewed Williams and Garbee at the sheriff’s office on the same day as the autopsy.

Garbee said RMG was sick on July 16, 2019 and had vomited; she said he ran a temperature of 101.3 through July 23, but she thought he only had “a bug.” She said on July 23, RMG ate some tortilla chips and cut-up hotdogs, but didn’t eat any dinner that night and wasn’t hungry. She said he later appeared to be feeling better, and she videoed him dancing with her other children that night.

Later that night, Garbee said she and Williams heard a noise and found RMG was on the couch in their living room and “kind of slumped” while trying to get up. After giving him a dose of Children’s Tylenol and some water, Garbee said, they took him to Mercy Hospital in Aurora. While en route, Garbee looked back at RMG and saw his head was slumped over and he appeared unresponsive.

During her interview, Garbee said when RMG would get in trouble by Williams, Williams would hold him in the air over his head, while his thumbs would be near RMG’s belly button area.

Williams denied any wrongdoing in his interview, stating he had only “lightly spanked” the boy’s buttocks for hitting him in the face while they were roughhousing; after that, he said he had only disciplined the boy with time outs where he would have to sit facing the wall.

Both Williams and Garbee are due to be sentenced on Tuesday, July 20. They each currently remain free on bail.
The case was originally heard in Lawrence County, but was transferred to Barry County on a change of venue.