Mother arrested in deaths of 2 young daughters found in Florida canal
LAUDERHILL, Fla. — When police arrived at the sprawling working class neighborhood on a call about a child’s body floating in a canal last month, the usual signs of a tragic, accidental drowning just weren’t there.
Gone was a father — anyone standing over the little girl desperately trying to breath life into the 9-year-old’s body. Gone was mother racing along the canal’s edge screaming out for help. Rather, there was a haunting backside of a child near the canal’s edge, slowly being pulled by the current toward the deeper, 10-foot water.
The little girl wore her hair in braids. She had denim shorts and a gray T-shirt. For hours police tried to find someone who knew her. They looked for missing persons’ reports. They came back with nothing. So they called her Jane Doe.
When police pulled Jane Doe from the water and placed her on the grassy bank, they saw multiple scratches around the child’s mouth. There was a small laceration near the left side of the child’s lip, according to the police report released to the South Florida Sun Sentinel late Tuesday afternoon only after the paper’s attorney’s got involved.
And then across the canal in another Lauderhill neighborhood on that day in June, police saw a woman shrouded in a white blanket. She belted out Bible scriptures. One minute she was claiming to be the devil and the next to be God, neighbors told the Sun Sentinel.
It would take many hours before police learned the woman was the girl’s mother — and by then the body of the second child surfaced in the canal. It would take another 21 days before the girls’ mother was arrested
Tinessa Hogan was arrested at Florida Medical Center in Lauderdale Lakes on Tuesday evening after police served her with a warrant on two charges of premeditated murder in the deaths of her two children. Hogan had been under psychiatric care since being discovered near the canal covered by a white blanket on June 22.
Tuesday night she was transferred Broward County jail. Wednesday, Hogan refused to stand before a judge to have her bond set. Judge Tabitha Blackmon went ahead anyway and ordered Hogan to be held without bond. The Broward Public Defender’s Office will represent Hogan.
Very little is known about Hogan and her two children, Destiny, 9 and Daysha, 7, said Lauderhill Lt. Michael Santiago. Hogan has really no footprint in social media or public records to provide any insight into who she is. Her home, across the canal from where her oldest child was found, said Santiago offered only a few clues that children even lived there.
“The case itself has offered real challenges,” Santiago said.
Challenges such as who is this woman and why do police think she killed her children.
Answers may be in the arrest warrant, Hogan’s arrest paperwork and the probable cause affidavit, all of which Blackmon agreed to have sealed for up to 90 days while police continue their investigation. Sealing such documents after an arrest is rare.
In court Wednesday, someone from the State Attorney’s Office said the documents needed to be sealed to not compromise the investigation.
What is believed to be credible is that police as well as the Sun Sentinel have been told that the night before the bodies of Destiny and Daysha surfaced in the canal, someone claims to have seen Hogan swimming in the canal while holding a Bible. That woman said Hogan swam over to her and offered to baptize her children. The offer was declined.
The idea that Hogan is a religious zealot seemed palpable as more people shared observations. People said Hogan was the type to seemingly pop up out of nowhere to discuss the Bible. Perhaps the most ominous was the report that a woman believed to be Hogan but possibly disguised in black shiny wig with long curls was spotted a week before her girls died holding a sign saying, “Death is the only answer.”
____
