Donald Tucker, 40, of 1860 Anson Ave., was indicted Monday on second-degree murder.

Rowan County Sheriff’s detectives say Tucker was house sitting at a mobile home at 117 Country Village Drive on the night of Oct. 10. Tucker was there with his 20-year-old daughter, Crystal Leeanne Tucker, and Crystal’s son, Sean Lee Tucker.

Crystal Tucker and her son lived with Donald Tucker at 1860 Anson Ave. in Kannapolis.

Investigators said Tucker was on a sofa at the home with Sean when the baby died. Sheriff’s Lt. John C. Sifford said they can’t elaborate until additional charges are filed.

Family members say Tucker was likely intoxicated and rolled over on the short couch and suffocated the baby.

The death review probably will take only three days but won’t take place until late January because of a backlog of cases, said Sara Anderson Mims, who oversees such reviews for the N.C. Division of Social Services in Raleigh. The studies typically include interviews with family members and a review of records kept by social workers.

Such reviews became law statewide following a string of three child deaths in Rowan County in a span of five days during 1997. The Rowan County Department of Social Services had been providing services to the families of those children.

“The whole intent is that what we can learn from these fatalities is to take a lesson from what we’ve learned and prevent future fatalities,” Mims said.

“It is absolutely a tragedy to me to think that any child has to die unnecessarily. We’re looking at the worst tragedies we can possibly think of. The only thing that really gets me through the day is to look at what we can learn.”

Mims said the agency only recently decided to review Sean’s death because no one had previously suggested that Sean’s death might not be accidental. Tucker was charged with murder last week.

“In the early stages, we weren’t getting a whole lot from law enforcement about suspicions of foul play,” Mims said.

The state conducts such reviews if a death meets two criteria, when:

• Anyone investigating a child’s death suspects that abuse or neglect may have contributed to the death.
• A child’s family had received child welfare services within the past year.

Jim Cook, director of the Cabarrus County Department of Social Services, said a case worker there had arranged for Tucker and Crystal to get a crib for Sean but declined to say how.

Several family members who asked not to be identified have said Tucker and Crystal got the crib and a cradle after taking an infant-care class in Concord.

“It wasn’t supposed to have happened, if (Tucker and Crystal) had only done what they were supposed to do,” one of Tucker’s relatives said. “If that baby had been in its crib it wouldn’t be dead today.”

Cook declined to confirm whether the Cabarrus County Department of Social Services had told Tucker not to sleep with the child.

“We were working with the family toward improving his capacity to care for this child,” he said. “... You can pretty much assume with a little one like that that we would assure it had a safe place to sleep.”

The N.C. Medical Examiner’s Office in Chapel Hill likely won’t complete an autopsy report on Sean until later this month or early January.

Marcia Herman-Giddens, a consultant and adjunct professor at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, said cases of children dying from smothering while sleeping with adults are too common.Herman-Giddens pushed for the law requiring more thorough reviews of child deaths two years ago after the deaths in Rowan County.

She has seen such cases in North Carolina that were ruled accidental, and others in which a parent was using drugs or alcohol and was convicted of murder or the lesser charge of manslaughter.

“I know that that’s happened,” she said, “but it has to be particularly egregious.