ZUNI

The five-year-old Zuni boy involved in an ongoing child abuse investigation by the Isle of Wight County Sheriff’s Office has died. Lt. Tommy Potter, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, said that the child passed on Tuesday evening at approximately 9:58 p.m. at the Children’s Hospital of the Kings Daughters.

The body has been taken to the Medical Examiner’s office in Norfolk for an autopsy. Investigators will be meeting later today with the Commonwealth Attorney’s office in regard to this case. As of Tuesday afternoon, no additional charges had been filed.

Last week, the Sheriff’s Department charged the boy’s mother, Jaye Lynn Hadley, 32, of the 7000 block of Yellow Hammer Road, Zuni, with felony child abuse and aggravated malicious wounding after county EMS personnel found the boy unresponsive. They also charged Justin Cox, 33, who last lived with Hadley and her son, with felony child neglect.

Potter provided a copy of the criminal complaint to the paper last Friday, which states that Hadley admitted to beating her son with a shoe on his bottom several times.

She also allegedly admitted to pushing him down, which caused the boy to hit his head on the floor. He got up, staggered and fell against a wall. According to Potter, Hadley, while checking on her son, let him go and he fell back, hitting his head on the wall again, putting a hole in the sheet rock.

Hadley and Cox are both in custody at the Western Tidewater Regional Jail with no bond.