A new audio recording sheds more light on the death of Quawan Charles, a 15-year-old Black teen who was found dead in a shallow Louisiana marsh with his face mutilated.
Janet Irvin, a white woman who was one of the last people to see Charles alive, can be heard in the recording telling a private investigator that she failed to immediately call police when she realized the teen had disappeared from her home.
“Yes I should have called the cops. I should have went further,” Irvin told the investigator, who was hired by attorneys representing Charles’ family.
The attorneys, Ronald Haley Jr. and Chase Trichell, provided to recording to CBS News, which aired snippets of the conversation during its CBS This Morning telecast Tuesday.
Charles was visiting the Irvin trailer home because he was friends with her 17-year-old son.
The PI also interviewed Irvin’s son, who said he and Charles “smoked some weed” together on Oct. 30, the day Charles’ parents reported him missing.
Haley on Tuesday described the audio as a key piece of the puzzle that confirms she was either a willing participant of drug use in her home or allowed it.
“I think the biggest information is the fact that she knew that he went missing and she didn’t do a damn thing,” he told Atlanta Black Star.
Trichell and Haley are awaiting results from Charles’ toxicology test to see if he had narcotics in his system. If he did, they believe that likely contributed to his death and contend the recorded conversation provides enough evidence to charge Irvin with child delinquency, serving minors drugs, child endangerment and other crimes.
According to attorneys, witnesses saw Charles and two friends walking to a fishing creek near Irvin’s home on Oct. 31.
Haley said Irvin didn’t report Charles missing until Nov. 2, about two days after he vanished from her custody.
Louisiana state law dictates that within two hours of not knowing his location and losing contact for a full day she had a responsibility to report him missing to authorities.
Charles’ body was discovered Nov. 3 in an empty sugar cane field near Loreauville, Louisiana. It was about 25 miles from his father’s home in Baldwin, Louisiana, where the teen was staying when his parents lost track of him.
Family members took photos of Charles’ severely mutilated face while viewing his body in the morgue. They shared the pictures online and one of them went viral, evoking memories of Emmett Till, the 14-year old Black teen lynched in Jim Crow-era Mississippi because a white store clerk accused him of whistling at her.
Iberia Parish coroner released preliminary autopsy results that indicated Charles drowned and “aquatic animals” gnawed at his flesh after he died. An independent autopsy conducted by a Texas forensic pathologists hired by family corroborated the coroner’s finding that Charles drowned.
But attorneys dismissed those explanations, arguing water in the ditch where Charles’ corpse was found was too shallow for him to have drowned “without outside influences.”
It remains unclear how Charles might have drowned, but attorneys have suspicions that he didn’t take his last breath in the sugar cane field.
“His body was found that sugar cane field, but we do not believe he walked into that sugar cane field and that’s where he succumbed to whatever,” Haley said. “We believe he was placed there.”
Haley contends Irvin and her son are among seven or eight people who know what really happened to Charles, based on attorneys’ private investigation. When asked about the impact of the audio tape, he described Charles’ family as “hopeful that this is a big shoe that is dropped, that would lead to an arrest.
“And hopefully that arrest will lead to the truth,” Haley said.
Charles attended school with Irvin’s teenage son in Youngsville, Louisiana, where he lived with his mother.
During the national firestorm surrounding Charles’ death last month, his mother Roxanne Nelson told local media that Irvin and her son picked Charles up from his father’s house without her knowledge or permission.
Irvin, in the recording, admitted that she drove to Baldwin with her son and picked Charles up after she got off work that day.
The Baldwin Police Department released surveillance footage Nov. 16, that appeared to show Charles voluntarily leave his father’s house with Irvin and her son the day of his disappearance. He’s seen sitting on his front porch just after 1:30 p.m. when the pair pulled into his father’s driveway. They played with Charles’ dog in the backyard and all three drove away minutes later.
Nelson grew worried when she was unable to reach Charles for hours. She called his father, who eventually ripped the teen’s bedroom door down and discovered he was not home. The parents flagged down a Baldwin police officer and reported Charles missing.
Family members say responding officers from the Baldwin Police Department and West St. May Sheriff’s Office told them the teen was likely at a football game.
Loved ones pointed to that as a sign of authorities’ lack of urgency in the initial investigation.
“If the police would have done their job and pinged his cellphone that evening, they would have found him at the Irvin residence,” Haley said. “He would have went home and been punished as opposed to dead a couple days later.”
Parents notified the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office on Nov. 3 that Charles may be missing there, and deputies discovered his body in the sugar cane field hours later.
No AMBER Alert was ever issued for Charles. Authorities claim that’s because there were no indications he was abducted, a threshold for the missing child notification.
The Sheriff’s Office is now investigating Charles’ death as a homicide. It was not immediately clear if the agency plans to incorporate the recording into its investigation. Department officials were not available by Tuesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, there are no indications Irvin has been listed as a suspect or person of interest in the case. According to news reports, the woman has an extensive history of drug, burglary and theft arrests and her family was evicted from their trailer park home shortly after Quawan’s death last month.
CBS reported that Iberia Parish Sheriff Tommy Romero has agreed to meet with Haley and Trichell to share investigative notes. Haley said the attorneys formally reached out to the Sheriff’s Office Tuesday requesting a meeting to go over the evidence they’ve uncovered.
“Hopefully, they’ll be forthcoming with us with the notes that they have,” he said. “What I believe, though, is that Janet, if she’s the first domino to fall, I think other dominoes will fall shortly thereafter. Folks will think it’s serious, if it wasn’t serious before, now that there’s an arrest made. Do I think Janet is responsible in part for what happened to Quawan? Absolutely. Should she be charged with the murder of Quawan? That’s left to be seen. That’s the piece that we are unsure of.”
