JACKSON — A Vicksburg mother will continue to serve 30 years for the drowning death of her toddler son and the neglect of both her children after the Mississippi Court of Appeals on Monday affirmed her convictions and rejected all eight of her arguments for a new trial.
Brooke Mallett was convicted in Warren County Circuit Court of culpable-negligence manslaughter and two counts of felony child neglect. Circuit Judge M. James Chaney Jr. sentenced her to 20 years for the manslaughter count and five years on each neglect count, ordered to run consecutively.
The case began on the morning of April 21, 2023, when a woman on Old Highway 27 found a barefoot little boy standing in her living room. The child, who was Mallett’s 5-year-old son, identified only by a pseudonym to protect his identity, was hard to understand. When no one came looking for him, the woman called 911.
Deputies and a Child Protection Services worker drove the boy through the area and came to an abandoned house with the door partly open. Inside they found Mallett asleep with her boyfriend, John Walker. The home had no power and no running water, and investigators documented waste throughout, drug paraphernalia, a loaded gun, and cleaning chemicals within a child’s reach.
Mallett said she had a second son but did not know where he was. Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace joined the search on foot, and just after noon spotted a basketball floating in a pond, and then the body of the missing child. He could not be revived. The medical examiner ruled the death an accidental drowning. Both boys, Mallett, and Walker tested positive for methamphetamine, and a meth pipe was found in the couple’s bed.
In an opinion by Judge David Emfinger, the court noted this was not the family’s first contact with CPS. A year earlier the same child had been found wandering a highway in a soiled diaper, and he had once been hospitalized after ingesting roach poison, testing positive for meth then, too. Investigators learned Mallett had fled Copiah County, where she had an outstanding warrant, after being told she would lose her children if she failed another drug test.
On appeal, Mallett argued her indictment was defective, that the admission of the earlier CPS reports violated her right to confront witnesses and amounted to improper character evidence, and that her convictions ran afoul of double jeopardy, among other claims. The court rejected each.
On her claim that her trial attorney was ineffective in which she listed 28 alleged failures, the court declined to rule, dismissing it without prejudice so she may raise it later in post-conviction proceedings.
