Man throws ashes of ex’s dead child in trash after breaking into her home, SC cops say
A man is accused of breaking into the home of his ex-girlfriend and throwing the ashes of her dead child in a trash can, according to South Carolina police.
On Sept. 5, a woman called officers to report that her doorbell camera captured her ex-boyfriend entering her home while she wasn’t there two days prior, according to a report from the Mount Pleasant Police Department.
The video shows the man, Joseph Oberlies, 33, coming and going from her home twice between about 3:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Sept. 3, even though police had previously told him that if he was ever caught trespassing at the woman’s home, he would be arrested.
Oberlies and the woman had been dating on and off from November 2021 until around June or July, the report says.
The woman told police that while Oberlies was inside her home, he damaged her $1,000 flat-screen TV with a hammer, the report says. He also took an urn from her bedside table that contained the ashes of a dead child that she shared with her ex-husband, removed the top and threw them in a trash can.
The woman told officers that she feared what would have happened if she had been home at the time of the break-in.
“I’m afraid he would have killed us if we were here,” she told police, according to the report.
Oberlies, she said, had been becoming more violent and was out on bond after he was accused of stabbing a different ex-girlfriend. Charleston County court records show Oberlies was charged in August with one count of first-degree assault and battery and another count of throwing bodily fluids on a law enforcement or corrections officer.
When officers spoke to Oberlies, he told them that he was “black-out drunk” on the night he is accused of breaking into the woman’s home and does not remember anything, the report says.
Oberlies faces one count of destruction or desecration of human remains and one count of first-degree burglary, according to the police report. No attorney for Oberlies was listed for that case. An attorney listed as representing Oberlies in a different case did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mount Pleasant is about 120 miles southeast of Columbia.
This story was originally published September 12, 2022 at 10:47 AM with the headline "Man throws ashes of ex’s dead child in trash after breaking into her home, SC cops say."