Warrant: Mom accused of Munchausen by proxy perpetuated lies about children’s illnesses
A new warrant filed by the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office in the case against a 30-year-old woman accused of poisoning her children to fake epilepsy sheds new light on the way the woman portrayed her children’s ailments on social media.
Jesika Lynn Jones is facing charges of injury to a child and endangerment of a child. She was arrested in July on charges related to one child. With the new warrant signed Sept. 12, she faces additional charges related to her two other children.
According to the warrant, Jones has admitted to poisoning her children and said she wants help.
Authorities said in the arrest warrant affidavit that the woman poisoned her children with medications like Clonidine and Benadryl to induce seizures, drowsiness and mental slowness and to make it appear that they were epileptic. Jones was already facing charges after doctors told authorities they suspected she had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, but the new warrant includes Facebook posts and messages the mother made and sent in which she claimed her children had epilepsy.
Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a condition in which a caretaker — often a mother — fakes symptoms in someone else — usually a child.
Jones took her one of her children to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth multiple times claiming the child had seizures, according to the arrest warrant affidavit. It was there that doctors began feeling concerned and contacted law enforcement, suspecting child abuse.
In the posts and messages, Jones talks about things including how difficult it is to be the mother of multiple children with epilepsy, how her children are so brave, how she is a nurse (which investigators said was a lie) and how she became pregnant with her first child at 17.
In one post made on March 26, National Epilepsy Awareness Day, Jones wrote that her first child, who is now 11, was diagnosed with epilepsy after her first seizure at 4 months old and that her twin children “developed and starting having epileptic seizures” in November 2021.
She said in that post that she felt “weak” seeing her child suffering from epilepsy.
“She’s taught me the true meaning of strength, seeing my child so vulnerable at times made me just feel so weak but I couldn’t ever let her see me down,” Jones wrote, according to the arrest warrant. “Being a parent of a child who has epilepsy is rough just as anyone you know your child will have their good days and their bad days, but our bad days usually end up with hospital stays.”
She described it as “living life on the edge because you never know when the next seizure will hit.”
She even took her children and invited others to attend events to raise awareness for epilepsy, like a Walk to End Epilepsy in Dallas, the warrant says. The money raised at that event would go to pay for medicine and hospital expenses as well as to go to summer camps.
But authorities wrote in the warrant that Jones did have at least some idea of when the next seizures were going to hit because she was intentionally causing them. Investigators said Jones admitted to them that she lied to doctors about which medicines she was giving her child, how much medicine she was giving and when she made the child take the last dose.
The warrant states that when a Tarrant County sheriff’s detective interviewed Jones, she said she was “a habitual liar” and had given the child Benadryl “more times than I should have.”
According to the warrant, in one message, Jones says one of her children is embarrassed that her softball coaches have to know she has epilepsy, and ends the sentence with, “but oh well lol.” In the same message, Jones laments about how as a parent it was “beyond hard to watch your child lose their love and passion for the game” because coaches were afraid to let her play with epilepsy.
She says in a subsequent message to the same person that she was “the type of team mom that’s always overly prepared” with things like first-aid supplies and ice packs, according to the warrant. She wrote in the message that she was probably that way because she was a nurse. But, investigators note in the warrant, immediately after the message, that Jones is not and has never been a nurse.
According to the warrant, Jones told several people including men she was dating, friends and strangers on Facebook that she was a nurse. Some she told she worked at a hospital, others at a nursing home.
Messages and posts investigators said they retrieved from Jones’ Facebook account include times she told people she had to rush a child to the hospital because of seizures, telling people she knows how hard it is to be a parent because of her children’s epilepsy and how she’s upset that the medicine doctors prescribed for one of her children to stop seizures made her stomach hurt.
In one private Facebook message, investigators said, Jones lied that her child had stopped breathing at one point in the hospital. Doctors told detectives that didn’t happen.
Jones would also post photos of her children in hospital beds and talk about how the children wanted to leave the hospital but were being held for testing and observation because of their supposed epilepsy, according to the warrant.
The warrant mentioned thousands of pages of posts, messages and comments from Jones’ Facebook page obtained by law enforcement. Many of them appear to be promoting how much she cares about her children and how difficult it is to be a mother to children with epilepsy. But when she spoke to police, Jones said she hated herself for what she was doing.
““I think I’m a horrible person. I don’t love myself. I don’t like who I am. I’m tired of living life like this. I’m tired of hurting people emotionally, (redacted) medically,” the arrest warrant states that Jones told Detective Michael Weber. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I just know I need help. I really do. I want help.”
Star-Telegram staff writer Kaley Johnson contributed to this report.
This story was originally published September 16, 2022 at 6:39 PM.