A woman shot and killed her 3-year-old son and then herself in a western Minnesota farmhouse where she was accused of helping to run a methamphetamine lab, authorities said Monday.
Amanda Mae Nelson and her son, Tasher, were found dead in bed Sunday morning in the rented house near Erhard, 14 miles north of Fergus Falls. Nelson would have turned 22 on Friday.
The child had been shot in the chest and head and Nelson had been shot once in the head, said Lt. Michael McCormick of the Otter Tail County Sheriff's Office. The weapon was a .22-caliber rifle, authorities said.
McCormick said Nelson left a note and a recently dated will, but he could not provide a motive for the killings. Nelson was scheduled to appear in court Feb. 2 for a pretrial hearing on four first-degree felony drug charges in connection with the meth lab.
Hilary Caligiuri, an assistant attorney general in St. Paul who was prosecuting the case, said "I can't imagine that" there was a connection between the court case and the deaths since "these charges were filed way back when, last July."
She added: "It's certainly tragic, particularly that she chose to take her son's life as well. He's obviously the innocent in all this The whole thing is tragic."
Nelson's case apparently resulted from stepped-up law-enforcement efforts to find rural meth labs by asking storekeepers to tell them of unusually large or frequent purchases of meth ingredients, Caligiuri said.
A western Minnesota drug task force and the Sheriff's Office raided Nelson's farmhouse July 18 and found methamphetamine and meth manufacturing equipment, according to the criminal complaint against Nelson. She, two other adults and a juvenile were arrested.
