Talk:Killing of Lacey Fletcher

Locked-In Syndrome highly questionable
It can be ruled out that Lacey suffered locked in syndrome as this renders a person unable to eat without medical intervention. Locked-In Syndrome has never been diagnosed, and some statements of the parents as well as findings at autopsy seem to be in contradiction with this notion.

Lacey was said to have parts of foam from the sofa in her stomach, and it is very likely she ate the foam just before her death because she was starving. With Locked-In Syndrome it is rare that individuals can still move parts of their body, such as one arm to feed themselves. Also the higher-order coordination between swallowing and breathing is usually lost, so they can't even be fed by hand without risking death by aspiration. Therefore, they are usually getting fed via nasogastric tube. Because of the loss of higher coordination of brainstem reflexes, they also usually can't speak, so the explanation given by Lacey's parents that she "never complained about anything" would make absolutely no sense.

Then, there is a report about the parents visiting a doctor around 2010 and reporting that their daughter would refuse to leave the sofa because of a "phobia". If she had suffered Locked-In Syndrome, that again would make no sense. Either she couldn't leave the sofa physically, or she wouldn't because of a mental health problem. Now which one is it?

There is unfortunately a lot of wild mass guessing going on about this case, and little reliable information is available about what actually did happen. But it has never been officially confirmed that Lacey had Locked-In Syndrome, and applying Ockham's razor to the available data, it seems more likely that her deteriorating mental health was the reason for her getting confined to that sofa.

A personality change in Lacey was first noted around 2000, followed by gradual social withdrawal, and around 2007, it was the last time a neighbor remembers having seen her outside her house. Now trying to give her a mental illness diagnosis would be wild guessing again, but in retrospective, it appears plausible that something gradually restrained her, first inside the house, then inside the living room, and finally on the sofa. It is also completely unclear what role her parents played in this, and their own explanations so far haven't been very informative - often they are outright self-contradictory. If you ask me personally, I'm not even sure the parents themselves are mentally sane.

Anyways, this is a really mysterious case, and we may never know who or what exactly caused Lacey to remain in her own excrements on her parents' sofa until she rotted away. Locked-In Syndrome is one theory that has apparently come up on the internet, but it is in no way confirmed that Lacey did have it.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/23/us-news/lacey-fletchers-sad-life-and-death-on-her-parents-couch/

https://metro.co.uk/2024/02/13/lacey-fletchers-parents-left-die-a-maggot-infested-couch-20252218/?ico=trending-module_tag_features_item-5

These two articles are relatively good and informative, and also pretty recent. You can see that the parents have provided a lot of conflicting information. The theory about Locked-In Syndrome may have come from them, too, but the coroner disagrees, saying he has never heard about that syndrome.

On the other hand, even Lacey's body weight at death is subject to conflicting information - I've read about anything from 69 and 89 to 96 and 98 lbs (the latter "only" being moderate malnutrition given that Lacey was reportedly just 1.55m tall), although that piece of information must have come from officials who scaled her corpse after "operating" her out of the sofa. 2003:E7:771D:6887:94B0:BEBE:F25E:3CBA (talk) 04:18, 2 March 2024 (UTC)


 * The parents are perhaps the least reliable source on what happened considering they lied about it for over a decade. At the very least LIS should be brought up in the article as it is the most commonly accepted scenario. TheXuitts (talk) 06:27, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Breast cancer
Where does that come from? I'm not aware that breast cancer was ever mentioned in the case of Lacey Fletcher. One of the sources mentioned descibes an unrelated case of a woman with advanced breast cancer who was allegedly infested with maggots. But in the case of Lacey Fletcher, the only confirmed diagnoses were "mild/high functioning" autism and social anxiety disorder. Plus the chain reaction of events following her neglect, leading to severe pressure ulcers, contractures, malnutrition and osteomyelitis. But no mention of any cancer afaik. 2003:E7:771D:6818:E12D:419F:B16C:B093 (talk) 02:01, 6 April 2024 (UTC)