A Napa mother has been charged with murder and a father has been charged with child endangerment in connection with the August 2024 death of their three-year-old son.
The case of Zayden Schultz, the three-year-old Napa boy who died on August 15, 2024, has been under investigation for nearly a year. On Friday, the boy's parents, 42-year-old Belen Shroyer Stephenson and 47-year-old Timothy Schultz were both arrested. Stephenson was charged with murder and child endangerment resulting in great bodily injury or death, and Schultz was charged with child endangerment.
The father was granted $1 million bail, while the mother is being held without bail.
"The arrests are the culmination of a nearly year-long investigation that started on August 15th, 2024, when Napa County Sheriff’s Deputies were dispatched to a residence on the 1600 block of Mary C Drive," the Napa County Sheriff's Office says in a statement.
Zayden Schultz was found unresponsive, and was later pronounced dead at Queen of the Valley Hospital. The county coroner determined his cause of death to be acute fentanyl intoxication.
That cause of death seems to only have just been made public. A GoFundMe posted two days after the boy's death indicates that the family was not aware of the cause of death, saying only that the boy "passed away in his sleep."
Investigators with the sheriff's office presented their case to the District Attorney’s Office, which then filed the charges last week.
Multiple other tragic cases have arisen around the Bay Area in which parents, who were drug users, were accused in the deaths of their small children, who died by fentanyl exposure.
A San Jose couple, Derek Vaughn Rayo and Kelly Gene Richardson, were both charged with murder last year in the August 2023 death of their 18-month-old daughter, Winter Rayo. The parents' alleged dealer, Philip Ortega, was also charged in connection with Winter Rayo's death, and last month we learned that he is also linked to the May 2023 opioid-related death of Baby Phoenix Castro, also in San Jose. That child's father, David Anthony Castro, has also been charged.
In 2022, two Santa Rosa parents, then-26-year-old Evan Frostick and 23-year-old Madison Bernard, were arrested following the fentanyl-related death of their 15-month-old daughter.
Photo via Napa County Sheriff
