A mum has been charged with murd3r after allegedly throwing her four-year-old son into a lake “as an offering to God”
Ruth R Miller, 40, is also facing two counts of domestic violence and one of child endangerment, said to be in relation to allegedly driving a golf cart with three of her older children aboard into the lake.
Miller’s husband, Marcus J Miller, 45, had himself d!ed hours earlier after drowning in the same lake, as he was apparently attempting to swim to a sandbar in another attempt to demonstrate his faith in God.
It happened on Saturday, August 23 at Atwood Lake in Ohio, where emergency services dashed to find several people in distress. However, Miller’s older children; her twin 18-year-old sons and a daughter, aged 15, were not seriously injured.
The incident happened at Atwood Lake where the family were staying
Now, police have confirmed Miller told them she was on a religious mission.
Speaking at a press conference, Tuscarawas County Sheriff Orvis Campbell said the defendant told officers she threw her youngest child – little Vincen – into the lake as an “offering to God”.
Miller is now due to appear in court to face the charges. It’s not clear, though, if the mum has entered a plea or retained an attorney.
Speaking previously, Sheriff Campbell had said the defendant, a member of an Amish church, was “supposedly hearing voices that she believed were God”. He continued: “That led her and her husband to go out and jump in the lake first.
“She believed that she and her husband had to pass these tests to show their faith, and when they didn’t, then Vincen became the price to pay for that. She says she and her husband went to this dock and jumped in the water because God was speaking to them, telling them to do things to prove their worthiness to God, to show their faith is complete. And they didn’t do very well in those.”
Some of the so-called tests were described by the sheriff as “bizarre,” largely consisting of swimming exercises. In one disturbing claim, the woman told investigators that God once instructed her to be “swallowed by a fish.” Marcus Miller’s final test was swimming to a nearby sandbar, according to police.
His wife told officers they had returned home to their RV after a number of failed tests, then returned at 5:30am to keep trying. “She states that she went to the dock and that she threw the four-year-old in because that’s what she needed to do as an offering to God,” Campbell told reporters.
