A former MMA fighter has pleaded guilty to second degree murder in connection with the death of his 5-year-old daughter.
On Friday, January 23, Robert Buskey Jr. admitted in court that he acted with “depraved indifference to human life” and engaged in reckless behavior that caused his son’s death, according to the Daily Voice, a local news source in Schenectady.
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The incident occurred in April 2024, when emergency services responded to a call about an unresponsive child. Shortly after first responders arrived, the little girl, Charlotte, was pronounced dead at the scene. Her body was emaciated and severely dehydrated, and an autopsy revealed that she had no food in her body by the time she was discovered.
Robert Carneywho serves as the Schenectady County District Attorney, said in a statement that Charlotte was “huddled in her bedroom” until she died of dehydration and starvation.
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Further investigation revealed that the house – which was described as a “house of horrors” – was in horrible condition, according to the Schenectady County District Attorney’s Office. Authorities later determined that Charlotte and her 3-year-old brother were effectively cut off from the world, receiving no contact with friends or family, no medical care and no school attendance.
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Carney added, “Their world has shrunk to the confines of Mr Buskey’s deplorable home.”
The little girl also appeared to be denied access to the rest of the house for the most part as Buskey, 35, had a lock on the outside of her bedroom door which was reinforced with tape. Instead of a bed, the late 5-year-old was only given a Pack ‘n Play to sleep in that was so small that she had to be started to get into it.
“That’s where Charlotte spent her last days, abandoned and locked in her room by her father. She had no food, no water, no contact with anyone, in a Pack ‘n Play, left there to die,” added Carney.
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Along with the charge of second degree murder, Buskey also pleaded guilty to giving cocaine to his 3-year-old son. Both children tested positive for drugs.
He is expected to receive a sentence of 25 years in prison for his crimes.
“The resolution in this case rightly gives this defendant the maximum penalty allowed by law for the murder of his daughter,” Christina Tremante-Pelhamthe head of the Schenectady County District Attorney’s Office Homicide Bureau, said at the time. “And it spares the members of the Schenectady Police Department, the Schenectady Fire Department, and the District Attorney’s Office from having to relive the horror of what they saw in that home and the condition of this little girl who suffered such a horrible death at the hands of her father.”
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