StarLight Black Elk
StarLight Black Elk, Cassi’s third daughter, was born on January 25, 2022, at 10:50 p.m. Her birth was a difficult one. Cassi had COVID and was struggling to breath after giving birth. StarLight’s temperature was also too low, and she needed medical interventions to stabilize. Eventually though, mother and daughter were able to reunite the morning after StarLight entered the world.
Cassi and StarLight
Cassi remembers, even at such a young age, that StarLight’s sweet demeanor stood out to her.
“She was really my little sweet baby. I used to talk to her and she would smile at me all the time. She would never really cry. She would just sit there and joke around with me. I have a lot of videos of her doing little things like that.”
Cassi also recalls the immediate bond Leyza and Emmy built with their new sister.
“Leyza adored her. She was so ready to meet her. During Emmy’s first time meeting her and being able to hold her, she called her ‘baby, my baby.’ Today, Emmy swears she holds her sister in her tummy or in her heart.”
Cassi recalls with a bitter sweetness her first public outing with her baby daughter.
“My first little outing with her was to Applebee’s for Valentine's Day. I was able to do these pictures for Valentines where I put little gold angel wings on her. I was so mad at myself for the longest time because if I knew she was going to leave me I would have never put those angel wings on her. I was so mad at myself for that.”
StarLight would pass away just a few days later.
A Great Loss; An Unjust Accusation
Cassi remembers the day before StarLight died was chaotic. She and her partner, Seth, were arguing. Despite the conflict between the couple, the family had dinner together that evening. Cassi’s last photo with her daughter was from that night.
Eventually, Cassi and Seth’s arguing reached a fever pitch and turned physical. Seth injured Cassi’s ear in the altercation. Seth left the apartment for the night to go to his sister’s home. Despite being angry with Seth, Cassi knew she needed to take care of her kids and turned her attention to her baby.
“I changed my baby’s diaper, I fed her, I swaddled her, and I laid down with her. We went to sleep.”
StarLight would reliably wake up in the early morning to eat. When Cassi woke up and StarLight still hadn’t made noise to eat, she knew it was unusual. It’s deeply painful for Cassi to recount the moments that came next.
“I was trying to shake my baby awake. I’m not even the one who called the cops, my daughter called the cops. They tried to talk me through how to give her CPR. I said, ‘I don’t know how to do that, I think she’s gone, I think she’s gone. She’s cold.’ She was so cold, she was blue. Just stiff.”
Cassi’s daughter Leyza also tried to save her sister. “Leyza wrote her story of that morning, too. She said she went and tried to give her CPR, she felt like she could save StarLight. We thought we could have saved her.”
Cassi anxiously waited for emergency responders to arrive and try to save her child.
“I ran to the door to open the two doors to get into the apartment so the cops could come straight in. I went back into the room, and not even a couple minutes later, a cop walks in.”
Suddenly, everything shifted.
“And that was that. They [the police] kicked us out of the room. ‘You gotta get out here. This is a crime scene.’”
Cassi was familiar with the responding officer because she had encountered him previously when she was dealing with a domestic incident between her and Seth. The officer noticed the blood on her ear from her fight with Seth. Police turned their attention to Cassi, asking questions about her ear injury. They soon told her that she had to go to the police department for questioning right away.
“I asked if I could give my baby a hug. They said no. I told Leyza to watch her sister for me, that I would be right back. Biggest lie ever. I didn’t come back for another 11 months.”
Caught in the Maze
Mere hours after her daughter died, Cassi was taken to the police department for questioning. Cassi remembers the moments that unfolded all too well.
“They take me up to some room. It felt like a maze walking through this place. It was all dark. I thought, ‘why the heck am I coming here?’ They ask me if I’m thirsty and for my phone. And then they start interrogating me–what happened to my daughter? What did I do to my daughter? Where is Seth?”
Cassi’s interrogation would continue for three hours. Investigators accused her of shaking her baby so hard that she killed her. When Cassi tried to tell them that she believed her daughter died from SIDS, investigators told her over and over again that SIDS was not real.
“They asked me if I did anything to my baby out of anger. I kept telling them ‘no.’ I asked them if they were trying to say that I murdered her. They said they just wanted to know what happened between Seth and I. They started asking me about how much alcohol I drank.”
Cassi’s legal team would later learn that investigators noticed a beer can on the counter of Cassi’s apartment and focused in on alcohol as a possible factor leading to StarLight’s death. Investigators accused Cassi of being too intoxicated to care for her daughter. Cassi acknowledges that she had drank the night before StarLight’s death, but that she was fully capable of caring for her children and had not been drinking into the early morning hours like investigators alleged during her interrogation.
Investigators continued to push Cassi to admit she or Seth had harmed Starlight. They claimed that they found bruising on StarLight, indicating abuse. They claimed that based on rigor mortis, they could tell StarLight had been dead longer than Cassi was saying. All of these claims were lies.
“They assumed I was drinking well into the morning. They were even accusing me of going to sleep next to my baby after she was dead like a crazy lunatic. Like I would kill my baby and then lay down and act like life was normal. I just had the worst accusations come at me.”
Despite the immense trauma Cassi was experiencing having just found her daughter dead and the exhaustion of enduring a multi-hour interrogation, Cassi never changed her story. She maintained that StarLight was perfectly fine the night before and that she fed her, changed her diaper, and swaddled her before laying her down to sleep like any other night.
“They [the investigators] disappear out of the room and I’m sitting there crying, praying, please give me my StarLight back. Then they come back in and say, ‘Well Cassandra, you’re under arrest for child neglect.’ They said, ‘you were drinking, and we’re going to have an autopsy following this and it will tell us everything that we believe happened.’ They were still holding on to this idea that I did something to her and that the autopsy would confirm what they thought happened.”
After Cassi was formally charged, investigators booked her into the local jail.
“They threw me into a cell with no mat, no toilet paper, and no cup for water. I sat in that cell all day for about 12 hours.”
She was then sent to the “23 and 1 maximum pod.” In other words, Cassi would spend 23 hours a day in her cell. Corrections officers told her she would spend time on lockdown for her own protection due to the nature of her charge.
“I walked into the 23 and 1 max pod. I remember seeing this lady [a corrections officer]. I’ll remember her face. The first thing she said was, ‘that lovely young lady that just came in, she just killed her five and a half week old baby.’ I was crying walking up those stairs.”
At the same time, Seth’s family were planning StarLight’s burial. Cassi had little input as to where and how her daughter was buried.
“I was only allowed out for 23 hours to go to her funeral. I rode with my daughter in the funeral van. I was able to ride with her one last time. I didn’t get to see the end of the funeral, when they buried her. I had to hurry back to the jail because of the snow.”
Cassi struggled to cope. The weight of StarLight’s loss and the separation from Leyza and Emmy was crushing.
“It was the saddest time of my life. I just cried when I got back there. I spent the first week in 23 and 1 and I wouldn’t eat my meals. One of the other girls was like, ‘you need to start getting your trays, they’re talking about putting you on suicide watch.’ I didn’t want to eat though, so I just gave my trays to her. I was so depressed.”
New Normal
Cassi needed a lawyer. A public defender out of Bismarck, James Loraas, would become her representation. During her first court appearance, she was given a $25,000 cash bond, which she could not afford, so she remained incarcerated.
“I lost my daughter on Saturday. My first court appearance was on Tuesday.”
Cassi believed that once StarLight’s autopsy results came back, everyone would know that she was innocent and did not hurt her daughter. She pushed her attorney to get the autopsy results.
“I was a regular nuisance to my public defender. I was calling him every other day. He would say, ‘I’m trying to get the autopsy report, I’m trying.’”
Weeks passed. Cassi continued to push for the autopsy results, but she says her public defender didn’t demonstrate any urgency in obtaining them. He told her they might not get the results for months.
Despite not having the results of StarLight’s autopsy, Cassi’s public defender presented her with a proposed plea deal from the State. He told her if she pleaded guilty to felony child neglect, then she would serve two years in prison and five years probation. Even though the child’s death is not an element of the crime of felony child neglect, the State was claiming that StarLight’s death was proof of the alleged neglect, and that Cassi was at fault for her death. This argument by the state made the autopsy results particularly relevant evidence. Cassi insisted she didn’t do anything to StarLight and she didn’t understand why she would plead to something that she didn’t do. She urged her public defender to get the autopsy results, believing they would prove her story. She asked her public defender what would happen if they got the autopsy results and it showed that she was innocent.
“He told me we would ‘deal with that later.’”
Her public defender encouraged her to take the plea deal, despite Cassi’s persistent requests to see the autopsy results first.
“I kept telling him that I didn’t do anything to her. I swore on everything. I told him that even as I was signing the plea deal. He just said, ‘The plea deal might just be for the best.’”
Despite maintaining her innocence, Cassi took the plea deal on the advice of her public defender. She was sent to the North Dakota Women’s Correctional and Rehabilitation Center in New England, North Dakota.
Cassi struggled during mornings the most. Saturdays were especially dark. The time reminded her of the morning she awoke to find StarLight unresponsive.
“All the girls knew that I was traumatized by mornings. I would sleep days away. I would have to force myself to get up and shower. I wouldn’t get out of bed on Saturdays because I hated Saturdays.”
While Cassi worked to adjust to her new life inside the women’s prison, the outside world was talking about her. Local and national media picked up her case, and her mugshot from the worst morning of her life was plastered across television screens and newspapers. Reporters would reach out to her for interviews, which she would always decline.
“I really didn’t know how much media coverage there was. I said it was propaganda. When I saw it, it upset me. How dare they make me sound like that? I don’t care for the news–the nerve of them to reach out to me and ask me to tell my side of the story. You took my name from me for a long time.”
Cassi slowly began to adjust to life in prison. She focused on staying strong for her children, who were now in a foster home, and journaling. She wrote her daughters letters every week. Leyza still has every letter Cassi sent during that time.
“My daughters came once for a family day. That was six months after I lost my daughter. They came with a social worker. It was fun, I was so excited. After they left, I came back a mess. I cried for a good hour. It was hard.”
During this time, Cassi also recalled her mother’s strength after losing her little sister, Angel. She leaned on her mother’s words and example to tap into her own maternal strength.
“The system, whatever it was, I felt like my spirit was going to be taken away by it. I was ready to just throw it all away. One of the first things my mom said to me was, ‘you have two little girls who need you. Don’t forget that.’ So, I held onto that. I realized that, when my mom lost my little sister, she had other little kids to raise. I aspire to be like my mom as a mother–the will to never give up because I have these little humans.”