Sheriff’s deputies were called out to a northwest Harris County neighborhood yesterday after a passing driver saw a mother dragging her young son out of a house and throwing him onto the pavement. When police finally got there, they encountered a disturbing scene.
The mother, police say, had badly mutilated her son with a knife, stabbing the four-year-old boy all over his body, before dragging him out of the house to continue assaulting him in the driveway. The mother, 23-year-old Jenea Mungia, was topless when deputies arrived, according to KTRK. Medical responders airlifted the boy to Memorial Herman, taking him straight to surgery.
“Evidently she was in some kind of state,” Harris County sheriff’s deputy Thomas Gilliland told the Chron. “The scene itself was a terrible one for deputies to arrive to.”
Court records show Mungia was charged yesterday with felony injury to a child. The criminal complaint filed in court accuses her of stabbing and cutting the boy with a knife, hitting him with some other unknown object, and slamming his head on concrete.
Mungia has no other criminal history in Harris County. Records show she’s set to appear before a judge on Monday.
Citing an unnamed family friend, the Chron reports that Mungia may have suffered from postpartum psychosis since her son was born.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2015.