Mother ‘drowned her baby when he wouldn’t stop crying’

A 19-year-old mother was arrested after drowning her baby in a bathtub when he wouldn’t stop crying, police have said.

Madison Lee Stewart faces a charge of malice murder in the death of her 16-month-old son, according to Houston County sheriff’s Sgt Heath Collins. 

Collins said the child, Hunter Sebastian Stewart, died early Saturday morning in Warner Robins, a city in central Georgia.  

The incident occurred in the bathroom of a safe house for battered women, where Stewart said she’d been staying for an undisclosed amount of time because she had no other place to go.  

Stewart allegedly got up around midnight because the baby was crying, then filled the bathtub and submerged the child in water, Collins explained. 

She initially told police that the boy had drowned while she was giving him a bath. 

But later when she was interviewed at the station she described a different series of events, and according to police she said she was angry Hunter had woken her up. 

In that fit of rage she told police she held the child face down until he stopped moving, the Macon Telegraph reports.

He says Stewart told authorities she was stressed and had been going through a lot.  

‘The circumstances of the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart,’ the arrest warrant reads, according to the Telegraph. 

When officers arrived around the scene at around 1am Saturday, the boy was clothed in a wet T-shirt and jeans on the bathroom floor where he had been laid. He had no vital signs and was pronounced dead at Houston Medical Center. 

Stewart was being held without bail Monday in the Houston County jail. The report did not say if she had an attorney.

‘It’s just a tragic situation,’ Houston Sheriff Cullen Talton told the paper. 

‘I tell you what, it makes me sick just to thin somebody would do something like this.’  

Police found the man Stewart identified as Hunter’s biological father, but he denied he was related to the child.