Prosecutors To Seek Death Penalty Against Accused Child Killer

INDIO -Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for a man accused of killing his baby daughter near Desert Hot Springs nine years ago and leaving the corpse in a camper in Arkansas, a D.A.’s spokesman says.

Jason Michael Hann, 35, was indicted by a grand jury last September on a murder charge stemming from the February 2001 death of his months-old daughter, Montana.

Hann also faces a special circumstance allegation of a previous murder conviction.

Also charged in Montana’s death is Hann’s then-girlfriend Krissy Lynn Werntz, 30. She will not face the death penalty because no special circumstance allegations have been filed against her.

But Werntz could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

Hann’s attorney, Gregory M. Johnson, said the decision was disappointing.

“It’s disappointing but we’ll move forward,” Johnson, said. The defense attorney said he doesn’t expect the case to go to trial for at least a year.

Montana was born in Arizona in December 2000, and the family moved to a trailer park near Desert Hot Springs about a month later, according to a declaration in support of an arrest warrant prepared by Riverside County sheriff’s Investigator Gary LeClair.

Werntz told LeClair that on Feb. 10, 2001, she had gone to work and Hann had stayed home in their motor home with Montana.

Werntz said when she returned home, she picked up the infant from a bed in the bathtub, but the baby was dead, according to LeClair.

Hann told a Maine detective in 2002 that he had lost his temper and hit the baby on the side of the head with his hand, and she died later that day, LeClair wrote.

Hann decided to keep his daughter in a trash bag so they could keep her with them, according to LeClair, adding that the couple left California two months later to travel around the nation.

The couple left their daughter’s body in a trailer at a storage facility in Wynne, Ark., but when they didn’t make the rental payments, property managers seized the unit and put the contents up for sale, according to LeClair.

A man later bought the trailer from the unit and while cleaning it out, found the infant’s decomposed body. The infant’s injuries included skull and leg fractures.

The couple was arrested in April 2002 by Maine authorities at a Motel 6, according to court documents.

They were sent to Arkansas in June 2002 to stand trial for the death of their daughter, but a judge there ordered the case to be turned over to California authorities because the death occurred in Riverside County, LeClair wrote.

Hann was convicted in 2006 in Vermont of murdering his first child, a son named Jason, who was 5 weeks old when slain.

Hann is being held at the Indio Jail without bail. Werntz is free on her own recognizance.