The Colorado Court of Appeals has reversed the judgment made in the case of Madani Ceus, who was convicted on two counts of felony child abuse resulting in death in February 2020.
She originally faced two counts of first-degree murder, but a jury acquitted her on those charges, according to a document released Thursday.
Ceus, a Haiti native, was a spiritual leader of a doomsday group that started operating from a farm near Norwood in 2017. The land was owned by Frederick “Alec” Blair, who met the group at a gas station near Grand Junction and offered them use of the land. Shortly after, he joined the group as they lived in tents and cars.
According to the appeal document, Ceus banished two young girls, 10-year-old Makayla Roberts and 8-year-old Hannah Marshall, to a car on the property, where they would later die. She claimed that one of the girls was “impure” and forbade anyone to get them food or water from the group’s supply.
The girls’ mother, Nashika Bramble, discovered her deceased daughters late in summer 2017. The group members put a tarp over the car, and “to attempt to address the stench, two members then sealed the car with tape,” the court document said.
Police were notified of the girls’ deaths in September 2017 after Blair told his father about the incident. A forensic pathologist determined that possible causes were starvation, dehydration and hyperthermia and testified that the girls likely had died “several weeks or months before they were found.”
The Court of Appeals found that the jury “was not instructed to find beyond a reasonable doubt that the child abuse resulted in death,” which is a required finding to increase the charges from misdemeanor to felony, according to the document. The prosecution can retry Ceus for felony abuse, or may choose to ask the court for a misdemeanor child abuse judgment.
Ceus was sentenced to 64 years in prison by the district court in June 2020, according to reporting by the Telluride Daily Planet. Her husband, Ashford Nathaniel Archer, was found guilty of two felony counts of “child abuse, knowingly-recklessly causing death,” and a count of accessory to a crime, according to reporting in The Journal. He was sentenced 24 years in prison with credit for time served.
Reporting by The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel said that Blair accepted a plea deal in 2018, dropping the felony child abuse counts if he pleaded guilty to the accessory count. That count, classified as a Class 4 felony, could sentence him to two to six years in prison “under normal circumstances.”
It was later reported by the Telluride Daily Planet that he was sentenced to 12 years, and received immunity for testimony in the other trials.
Blair testified that he brought the girls food from a food bank, but Ceus declared that food “unclean,” the document said. Afterward, Blair said that he didn’t see anyone else contact the girls, and the group avoided the car, as Ceus claimed going near it would spread “gray matter.”
The group was awaiting the “apocalypse,” and according to the court document, Ceus told group members “to avoid ‘impure’ food and destroy possessions that could ‘infect’ or ‘contaminate’ them.” The group was mostly isolated by August 2017, and Ceus did not allow them to leave the property.
