Joliet girl’s death deemed undetermined in drug-related incident

The cause and manner of the death of a 12-year-old girl last spring in Joliet has been deemed undetermined, according to a Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office report.

On April 17, Mya King died after her mother, Colette Bancroft, 35, of Joliet, found her “facedown and unresponsive” on her bed at her Joliet residence, according to reports obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.

A urine screen of Mya was “positive for the presence of fentanyl” yet a postmortem toxicology on her blood was “negative for all substances tested on all samples,” according to an Oct. 19 report from Cook County Assistant Medical Examiner Claire Sorensen.

“It is unclear why postmortem toxicology performed on the provided hospital blood samples were negative for all substances tested. However, police investigation and hospital findings supporting a drug overdose as the cause of death may still be pursued by those agencies,” according to Sorensen’s report.

Sorensen’s report said that because a drug overdose “cannot be confirmed by our examination and ancillary studies, at this time the manner of death is best certified” as undetermined.

The cause of Mya’s death also was deemed undetermined. The medical examiner’s office had found Mya’s brain was deprived of oxygen because of a cardiac arrest of an unknown etiology, or the cause or origin of a disease.

The autopsy of Mya showed “no evidence of significant recent trauma,” according to Sorensen’s report.

Joliet Police Sgt. Dwayne English said Mya’s case remains under active investigation as detectives “continue to work with both the Will County State’s Attorney Office and the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.”

Officers had responded to Bancroft’s residence April 14 when she reported that Mya was unresponsive. After an investigation of the incident, Bancroft had been arrested on probable cause of possession of a controlled substance.

Court records as of Friday do not show any formal charges filed against Bancroft.

A preliminary investigation of the incident led police to believe that Mya “ingested an unknown amount of suspected heroin and fentanyl,” according to an April 18 statement from English.

Sorensen’s report said that Bancroft “admitted to a history of drug abuse,” and she had “multiple baggies of white powdery substance in her purse in the bedroom, as well as a crack pipe.”

Sorensen’s report said that family members who lived with Mya reported she had “been suffering from depression, had smoked marijuana before and sometimes cut herself on her forearms.”

“There was concern that [Mya] may have taken some of her mother’s drugs,” Sorensen’s report said.