Wesley Mathews, adoptive father of three-year-old Sherin Mathews who was found dead in a culvert in Texas in October 2017, is likely to have neglected and injured the child before her death, prosecutors believe. According to reports, a court document filed by Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Jason Fine says that prosecutors are trying to build a case against him on those grounds.
The document in question contains details of “extraneous offenses, alleged crimes, wrongs or acts” that the prosecution intends to use as evidence in Wesley’s upcoming murder trial, reported NBCDFW. Among these alleged offences is also one that accuses Wesley of injuring Sherin on or about February 1, 2017, with or without his wife Sini’s help, and causing the child to sustain multiple fractures in her arms and legs “to the bilateral humerus, femur and tibia." Sini and Wesley reportedly did not reveal these injuries for minimum one week, and the “history provided to doctors was not consistent with how the injuries occurred.”
Prosecutors said that for Wesley’s murder trial coming up on June 24, 2019, they plan to introduce several other alleged crimes, wrongs or acts as evidence against him as well. Apart from allegedly causing Sherin fractures, prosecutors say that he and Sini did not provide adequate nutrition to the child from September 1, 2016 till her demise.
On February 24, 2017, prosecutors allege that Wesley did not keep Sherin’s scheduled appointment at Failure to Thrive Clinic at Children's Hospital. They also say that Wesley provided false and misleading information to the Richardson Police Department throughout the investigation on October 6 and 7, 2018.
Wesley and his wife Sini, who were natives of Kerala, adopted Sherin from an orphanage in Bihar in July 2016. Sherin disappeared on October 7, 2017, and Wesley initially claimed that he had sent her out in the wee hours of the morning as punishment for not drinking her milk. On October 22, 2017, Sherin’s body was recovered from a culvert under a road about a kilometre from the Mathews’ home. The cause of Sherin’s death could not be investigated as the body had decomposed.
Wesley later changed his version, claiming that when he tried to feed her, Sherin had choked on her milk. He also admitted that the family had gone out to dinner and left Sherin behind a day before she died.
Wesley was indicted for capital murder by a grand jury and for tampering with evidence. Sini was charged child endangerment. However, Sini was released after 15 months in jail on March 1 this year due to insufficient evidence against her. The charges against her for child endangerment were dropped as well.
If Sini had been convicted in the case, she would have faced imprisonment for two to 20 years. It is worth noting that because she was dismissed without prejudice, the same or different charges can still be levelled against her at any point of time.