Woman could face death penalty in slayings after baby found near SIlver Springs

A woman accused of killing both her teenage ward and the girl's baby could face the death penalty if convicted of the slayings.

Lyon County District Attorney Robert Estes said prosecutors may seek the death penalty against Erin Rae Kuhn-Brown, 31, of Sacramento.

Kuhn-Brown is being held by Sacramento authorities after her arrest Monday in the deaths of 17-year-old Kathaleena Louisa Draper and her baby, who had been cut from Draper's womb.

Draper's body was found wrapped in plastic by the side of a Sacramento road on Saturday, the child was not with her.

Sacramento investigators traced Draper to Kuhn-Brown, who was her legal guardian.

Kuhn-Brown voluntarily returned to Nevada and directed authorities to the body of her newborn great-nephew Tuesday morning.

The newborn was found in a plastic bag four miles north of Silver Springs on the Highway 95 Junction, otherwise known as Damon's Curve. A Washoe County forensics team has sealed off a room at the Lazy Inn Motel on Mainstreet in Fernley where the niece and aunt stayed.

Police found a knife in the room, but it was unknown whether it is related to the crimes. The motel room is being treated as a crime scene, said Lyon County Sheriff Sid Smith. Kuhn-Brown has returned to Sacramento and authorities are awaiting a governor's warrant to extradite the suspect back to Nevada to face murder charges.

Draper moved from Las Vegas three months ago to live with her aunt in Sacramento, and Kuhn-Brown had planned to adopt the baby, police said.

According to Sacramento Police Detective Lance McHenry, they had an argument after the teenager decided to keep the baby.

Detectives believe that after the argument Thursday, en route back to Draper's mother's home in Las Vegas, Kuhn-Brown asphyxiated Draper and surgically removed the baby.

Kuhn-Brown, an emergency room technician at a south Sacramento hospital, sought to deliver the baby alive, but it died a short time later, McHenry said.

Kuhn-Brown was to be booked into jail in Sacramento on Tuesday evening. She was assisting in the investigation in Nevada and was to be arraigned in Sacramento today for what was considered a double-murder case, McHenry said.

She was to be held without bail, he said.

No one was home Tuesday afternoon at the mustard-colored home in the Emerald Meadows Mobile Home Court where Kuhn-Brown and her niece lived.

A neighbor who identified himself as Johnny Cochran said Kuhn-Brown was volatile.

''She would go from being a nice person to being really belligerent,'' Cochran said. Neighborhood children who ''messed with her kids'' were frequent targets of her anger, he said. It wasn't clear how many children she has.

Still, Cochran said, ''I didn't think she was capable of something like that.''

Another neighbor, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said Kuhn-Brown and Draper were fighting with increasing frequency.

Court records indicate that last fall Kuhn-Brown filed a domestic violence case against Kenneth Short Brown, her one-time husband with whom she lived sporadically, one month after he filed a similar case against her. Neighbors said the two have split.

The two were also named as parents in a paternity case Sacramento County filed against Kenneth Brown in March, and a Temecula resident claimed in state court four years ago that Kuhn-Brown owed him $34,357.

The pair filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in 1996.

It wasn't immediately clear how those cases were resolved.

The records show Kuhn-Brown used several aliases, including Eric Kuhn Brown and Erlinda R. Brown, and listed several addresses in Nevada and California in recent years.