By NOELLE CROMBIE/The Oregonian/OregonLive
The mother of a young girl whose remains were found a year ago along a muddy riverbank at a highway rest area in Lincoln County was arrested Tuesday afternoon during a traffic stop in Michigan, on allegations that she killed the child.
Shawna Browning, 28, and her longtime companion, Lauren Harrison, 33, face aggravated murder charges in the killing of Hayley Mae Coblentz, 9.
The arrests cap a nearly yearlong effort by Oregon State Police to identify the child and determine the circumstances of her death. The girl appeared to have no record of schooling or involvement with Oregon’s child welfare system, said state police Lt. Cord Wood, who is overseeing the investigation. Hayley was never reported missing, police said.
Browning and Harrison were homeless and survived by panhandling, Wood said Wednesday. They moved around a lot and had spent a significant amount of time in Oregon, he said, though they have no ties to the state. He said they have no criminal record in Oregon, though they had contacts with police over the years.
The pair had been living in a hotel in Detroit, Michigan at the time of their arrest. They were taken into custody without incident by Oregon State Police investigators and agents with the FBI’s Detroit office.
The women are being held without bail in the Wayne County Jail and made their first court appearances Wednesday. Lincoln County District Attorney Lanee Danforth said it could take up to 60 days to get Browning and Harrison back to Oregon to face charges.
Investigators relied on DNA and a genetic genealogy analysis by a private lab, Parabon NanoLabs, to identify the girl and were able to verify her name on Oct. 4, Wood said.
“It’s something we have worked on constantly since we found her last December,” Wood said.
The Virginia-based lab has helped solve 17 cases of unidentified human remains in Oregon and is working on another 30 cases, said Dr. Nici Vance, the state’s forensic anthropologist, who called the lab “instrumental in solving some of Oregon’s most difficult, complex unidentified remains cases.”
Hayley’s body was first discovered on the morning of Dec. 10 by a motorist who had stopped at the rest area off Oregon Highway 18 in the H.B. Van Duzer Forest State Scenic Corridor east of Lincoln City.
Wood said her remains had been there for 30 to 60 days. Her body had been placed in a duffel bag and left along the banks of the Salmon River, about 75 to 100 yards from the rest area parking lot on the eastbound side of the highway.
She was wearing a pull-up diaper, but Wood said investigators don’t know why.
“There are lots of reasons that kids can wind up in that circumstance,” he said. “We are exploring those.”
Wood declined to discuss how the child died or the evidence that links Browning and Harrison to the killing.
In court records, Harrison is identified as Browning’s co-defendant. Both are accused of aggravated murder for the intentional and premeditated killing of a child younger than 14. The crime is punishable by life in prison or the death penalty, although Oregon has a longstanding moratorium on executions. A warrant filed last week by the district attorney’s office identifies the girl only by her initials and says she died between Sept. 1 and Dec. 10. The district attorney’s office listed Browning’s last known address in Oregon as a Shiloh Inn in Newport but gave no date.
Estranged from family
Browning has been estranged from her family for years, relatives said. Her aunt, Sara Schnurpel, who lives in Arizona, said Browning grew up in Colorado and that the family assumed she had disappeared in response to what Schnurpel described as a traumatic childhood.
“We never blamed her for not being in touch anymore,” she said. “Shawna’s had a very, very rough life.”
“Honestly, we were scared to death that Shawna had been sold into human trafficking,” Schnurpel said. “She just vanished.”
Browning’s last Facebook post was in 2015 when she noted she was married to Harrison.
Leta Popa, another of Browning’s aunts, said the family doesn’t know who Hayley’s father is. She said the girl was given the last name of Browning’s girlfriend at the time.
Popa, who lives outside of Vail, Colorado, where Browning grew up, said she last saw Hayley when she was a baby. “I watched her a lot,” she said. Hayley and the girl’s little brother “were sweet and full of life,” she said.
Browning withdrew after meeting Harrison, Popa said.
“She got into drug use,” she said. “She began to isolate.”
Chris Hirchert, Browning’s father, said he last saw his daughter in 2014. The next year he got a phone call from her while she was in South Dakota. She told him she was fine.
“She never contacted me again,” he said. “I tried through various avenues to try to locate her.”
He said he had helped care for Hayley and Hayley’s brother before Browning disappeared. The girl had an “impish grin,” he said.
“She was a sweet child,” he said. “She called me poppy.”
“I can’t imagine what my granddaughter went through,” he said. He said he plans to ask Oregon authorities if he can claim his granddaughter’s remains so she can be laid to rest near his home in Pennsylvania.
During one of their times in Oregon about six years ago, Browning and Harrison stayed at a motel on Oregon 58 in Lane County.
Shelby Humphreys Erickson told the Oregonian/OregonLive that she remembers both women well from the week they stayed at her family’s now-defunct motel with both Hayley and her brother. They paid about $40 a night with bottle returns, she said.
The children’s clothes weren’t clean and the couple seemed determined to keep the kids out of sight, even on sunny days, Humphreys Erickson said.
“I talked to them all the time,” she recalled. “They would sit out in front of the motel. They didn’t want the kids to be seen. They wanted the kids in the room.”
Browning seemed to have little to do with the kids, she said, and Harrison “just yelled at them all the time.” She said the couple appeared preoccupied with keeping the boy in the motel room at all times. She recalled that Hayley was very quiet.
Ashley Perkins, the motel housekeeper, said she was so disturbed by the conduct that she said she went home after work one night and Googled their names. Up popped a law enforcement bulletin out of Colorado that said the pair had taken off with Hayley and Browning’s younger son. The boy’s father had custody of the child and a judge ordered the boy’s return, according to the bulletin by the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office west of Denver.
The announcement suggested the two women were itinerant and had perhaps lived in southern Oregon at one point.
Perkins and Erickson called Oakridge police, who showed up with state child welfare workers. They took the boy, Perkins said.
The boy’s extended family members came to Oregon to get him, she said.
Hayley stayed behind.
“That poor girl,” Perkins said.
— Noelle Crombie; ncrombie@oregonian.com; 503-276-7184; @noellecrombie