A Laconia, N.H. woman has been arrested and charged in the Christmas Eve 2019 death of her 5-year-old grandson, according to law enforcement authorities.
Sherry Connor, 61, faces multiple counts, ranging from manslaughter for recklessly causing the death of the juvenile and negligent homicide, to assault and witness tampering, according to a joint statement issued Friday by Colonel Mark Hall, of New Hampshire State Police, Chief Matthew Canfield of the Laconia Police Department, and Keith Cormier, county attorney for Canfield and Belknap.
Connor will be arraigned in Belknap County Superior Court at a later date, the statement said.
Her arrest comes nearly five years after a horrific murder that has been well-chronicled in New Hampshire local media.
Authorities deemed the death of Dennis Vaughan Jr. on Dec. 24, 2019 as “suspicious,” and an autopsy ruled the child’s death a homicide from blunt force trauma to the head and neck, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office said in a statement issued in 2020.
The injured boy was in an apartment at 103 Blueberry Lane, unit 67, in Laconia with several other family members when police responded. He was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead, prosecutors said in 2020.
The child and his three siblings had been placed into Connor’s custody by state officials two years before his death at her apartment on Dec. 24, 2019, according to The Laconia Daily Sun.
Vaughan Jr. would have turned 10 on June 11, according to a Facebook page calling for justice in his killing.
Upset over the long lag in an arrest and and faced with a three-year statute of limitations, the boy’s mother and Connor’s daughter, Danielle Vaughan, filed a lawsuit against the New Hampshire Division for Children, Youth, and Families in December 2022, the Laconia Daily Sun reported.
The suit outlined more than 25 reports submitted by teachers, nurses, social workers, law enforcement, neighbors, and anonymous sources of suspected physical abuse and neglect of the Vaughan children while they were in their grandmother’s care, the paper reported.
Tonya Alanez can be reached at tonya.alanez@globe.com. Follow her @talanez.