BOY LEFT IN HOT CAR MAY HAVE BEEN BEATEN

BILLINGS - New court documents show that three-year-old Jaren Blacksmith may have been beaten hours before his death.

Lavanna Bird, 50, was Blacksmith's foster mother. She is now being held in the Big Horn County jail on charges of negligent homicide after his death on August 17th.

Bird's nephew, David TurnsPlenty, said she had been little Blacksmith’s foster mother for about a year.

“My aunt isn't a hardened criminal, but yet, she's being treated like one,” said Bird’s nephew, TurnsPlenty.

Investigators say he was left sleeping in a car outside this home when temperatures outside hit 93 degrees.

“She really took this little one in like it was her own and she really cared for him,” said TurnsPlenty.

Blacksmith was found dead inside a grey GMC Envoy. A federal affidavit reveals Bird beat him earlier in the day in the parking lot at Indian Health Services on the Crow Reservation.

The FBI usually handles major crimes on Indian land. Bird's family insists that the mother of three kids, grandmother, and foster mother would never do such a thing.

TurnsPlenty questions how law enforcement concluded that the child was abused. He said his aunt wouldn’t do such a thing, “who are they getting their information from,” he said.

The federal documents show one of Bird's other foster children, a girl around seven or eight years old was the one who informed investigators Bird slammed Blacksmith's head on the floorboard and against the windows of the vehicle. Investigators also said Blacksmith was left in the car twice on that Wednesday afternoon; once when Bird went into the clinic to try and get a walk-in appointment and, again, when she returned to their home in Hardin.

The little girl also told investigators she saw Blacksmith flailing in the car around 2:30 in the afternoon. Nearly four hours later Blacksmith was dead. An autopsy revealed fresh bruising to his forehead, scalp, right cheek, mid shoulder, and upper back region.

The coroner ruled the cause of death hyperthermia.