Jones County, Mississippi -- Latina Marie Oates was suffering from a severe mental disorder at the time she killed her son in a Laurel, Mississippi hotel room and is not faking it to try to avoid prison. Dr. Criss Lott of Ridgeland, & Dr. Robert Storer of Baton Rouge, a pair of forensic psychologists testified as a defense in the capital murder trial in Jones County Circuit Court.
The 36-year-old Ohio mother claimed she believed her 11-year-old son was a demon when she killed him in a Mississippi hotel bathroom three years ago, beating him with an “ancient dagger” — which was actually nothing more than a metal bar. The two experts in the field of psychology talked at length about their mental evaluations of Oates, which included plenty of disturbing and bizarre revelations about her mindset leading up to when she killed 11-year-old Joshua in the hotel eventually pushing the bar through the back of his head while her two younger sons were there in the bedroom in March 2020.
Just before that, Oates went down to her car to smoke, Storer said — “I’m not sure if it was marijuana or a cigarette” — and while she was there, she opened the trunk to get the backpack that contained the “ancient dagger.” That’s what she called the piece of metal that she had brought from Ohio after “cleansing” it through some sort of ritual. She ran water in the tub — making it “holy water” by dropping in a piece of toilet paper she had used to wipe herself after urinating — then went to the bed Joshua was in. His “eyes were red, he was growling, he was not human anymore,” Storer said of Oates’ account of what happened at the hotel. She believed she was following the instructions of Jesus to kill a demon, he said.
Oates tried to pierce the youngster’s heart with the ancient dagger, but he woke up and there was a struggle to get him to the bathroom. Her rosary broke and was on the floor in the form of two upside down crosses “indicating there was a demon in the room ... She pushed him under the water, and she doesn’t remember much after that,” Storer said.
Attorney Lenderrick Taylor of the Office of Capital Defense questioned Dr. Storer about Oates' intentions to flee, Storer saying that Oates and her other two sons remained there “because Jesus said he’d come get us." Oates said that she threw up, “trying to get the evil out of me,” and that "Jesus told her to take the younger sons and leave." Storer also testified that Oates was “surprised by the arrest” in New Orleans the next day “because she thought Jesus was coming to get (Josh).” She was led to a house in New Orleans that had a fleur de lis on the gate, indicating she would be “the first saint in.” She believed she was fourth in line to Jesus.
After the jury returned its guilty verdict, Circuit Court Judge Dal Williamson ordered Oates to serve a sentence of life in a state correctional facility without the possibility of parole. Jurors rejected the options of finding Oates not guilty by reason of insanity and not guilty but not restored and still presenting a danger to society.
Throughout the trial, Oates’ defense attorneys argued that she was in the midst of a psychotic break when she brutally killed her son. A forensic psychologist testified for the defense earlier in the week that she did not know what she was doing was wrong at the time.
The attack on the boy was brutal — he suffered more than 60 wounds — and Oates’ two other sons told authorities they heard Joshua pleading with his mother and saying, “Why are you doing this?”
Oates was arrested in March 2020 after she took her three children from their Ohio home and drove to Mississippi without telling her husband where they were going.
Oates on March 17, 2020, was spotted on surveillance footage with her two younger children leaving the Hampton Inn in Laurel. Shortly after they departed the hotel, authorities found Joshua’s body inside their room and issued an arrest warrant for Oates. She was later arrested in New Orleans.
Prosecutors with the Jones County District Attorney's Office argued that Oates knew what was doing when she hit Joshua more than 60 times with a 1 ½-inch metal rod and left his body for a hotel housekeeper to find late on the morning of March 14, 2020. By then, authorities said Oates fled with her other two sons, then ages 9 and 6, to New Orleans, where police arrested her March 15, 2020, after Mississippi authorities issued an Amber Alert for them.
Oates' husband, Mark, testified for the defense at trial that problems with his wife began in January 2020, when she became overly religious and was struggling to the point that EMS personnel were called to the home in February 2020 because he did not know what to do. Although Latina Oates' mother urged him to tell the medics that her daughter was a threat to herself and others when he called her, Mark Oates testified he did not feel that way at the time. Oates testified that, one morning in March his wife took the three boys hiking and then left for Mississippi because she said she had to get away, when police came to the father a few days later to tell him that Joshua was dead, Mark Oates testified they asked him why his wife would go to New Orleans. He said he told them about Marie Laveau, a New Orleans woman famous for her practice of voodoo in the 1800s to heal and help others, with whom Latina Oates believed she shared ancestry.
A “creeping onset of symptoms” of schizophrenia began in January 2020, three months before Joshua was killed, Dr. Storer said. That’s when Oates began hearing the voice of her deceased grandmother, who was from Laurel. She told Oates to get her husband — from whom she was separated — back in the house with their boys.
She took unplanned trips to Chicago and Florida, but during the latter, believed “someone put a hex on her.” She was reading Michelle Obama’s book and believed the former first lady was “speaking to her and telling her that Obama was a demon,” Storer said.
Oates made the trek to Laurel because Jesus told her she needed to “go where your roots are” and get her “kids out of hell,” referring to Columbus, Ohio. The two younger sons were there, so she got them and went to pick up Josh, who had spent the night at a friend’s house. The people there were “witches and warlocks ... and (Josh) had been attacked by demons and was becoming a demon,” Storer testified.
Oates drove straight through for 10 hours to Laurel with no GPS as “ghosts lined up along the highway...to taunt me, scare me” and she was supposed to meet a cousin here, but she didn’t show up.
The “ancient dagger,” which was a piece of metal that had been discovered by middle son Mark back in Ohio, had been “used to kill ancient demons,” voices told Oates. Those voices instructed her to “find Native American ground” to bury it in, but when she got to a national forest to do that, the voices told her to “hold on” to it, Storer said. Oates and the boys then went to a theater to watch “Sonic the Hedgehog,” and during that, she heard voices say that a “blue devil is coming to attack us,” and she needed to touch stone, so she “stuck her hands in the toilet.”
Dr. Lott described Oates as “very delusional,” noting that she had, at different times, believed she was Cleopatra, that she was Mary Magdalene and married to Jesus and that she was voodoo queen Marie Laveau. His evaluations were in November and December of 2021 while Storer’s was three years after the incident.
Oates told Lott that she had believed her oldest son was a demon “and she had to kill him so he wouldn’t kill my other son, who was Jesus Christ.”
When public defender Cruz Gray asked Lott his opinion of what should be done for Oates, he said, “She should be hospitalized, carefully monitored and treated in a psychiatric setting. Without medication, the voices won’t go away. With medication, she can function reasonably well and interact with others appropriately.”
Both psychologists said that Oates had a family history of schizophrenia and that she was sexually abused when she was 12. Both also testified that she believed “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty,” that she really believed she was killing a demon, not her son.
Latina Oates did not testify in her own defense.The Jones County (Mississippi) jury deliberated less than five hours before reaching its decision on the fourth day of her trial. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty.
