A mother of two young boys — one who died and another who miraculously survived two days in a ditch beside a US highway during a hurricane — has been charged with murder.
Aaliyah N Jack, 25, was initially accused of failing to report a missing child, after being arrested in the US state of Mississippi, hundreds of kilometres from where her boys were located.
But charges against the Louisiana woman have been upgraded, the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office says.
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The charges now include two counts of failure to report a missing child, cruelty to a juvenile, and second-degree murder.
Her bond was set at $US9.1 million ($A13.4m).
“Although we have upgraded charges on Jack, our detectives still have a lot of work to do,” Sheriff Gary Guillory said.
“The investigation will continue while we wait for the autopsy results of the victim.”
Jack’s four-year-old son was found in a lake behind the Vinton Welcome Center on Monday, two days after he was last seen with his mother and sibling.
A warrant was issued for Jack before she was arrested in Meridian, Mississippi, without her younger child.
The one-year-old was spotted by a truck driver on the Interstate 10, close to the Louisiana-Texas border and just a few kilometres from where the body of his four-year-old brother was found.
Divers were preparing to search the lake for the baby before he was found by the highway, crawling in a ditch.
Guillory said it was a “miracle” the child was unharmed, other than a few insect bites, during Hurricane Beryl that struck east Texas.
“This kid spent two days out in the weather on the side of the highway,” Guillory said on Tuesday.
“Thank God that trucker (saw) him.
“When you look at the video, here he was, you know, crawling toward the highway.
“We look at this one-year-old as our miracle baby because he was still alive.”