Emmett woman pleads guilty to 2 felonies, but granddaughter’s death a mystery

(Idaho Statesman) – Ten months after 8-year-old Taryn Summers’ body was found in a trash bag, her Emmett grandmother has pleaded guilty to charges related to her death, the Idaho Statesman reports.

Connie Ann Smith, 54, pleaded guilty to felony injury to a child and felony failure to notify authorities of a death, according to a press release from the Gem County Prosecutor’s Office on Wednesday.

The week of Feb. 6, prosecutors and Smith entered criminal mediation ahead of a scheduled trial in March. Mediation is a process by which all parties involved in a case voluntarily meet in an attempt to resolve all or part of the issues at hand.

Smith’s guilty plea, entered in court on Wednesday afternoon, could send her to prison for as many as 20 years, according to the release.

In what was initially announced by the Gem County Sheriff’s Office last April as a case of a runaway child, authorities eventually located a body inside of a trash bag on the backseat floorboard of a Lexus. The vehicle was parked in front of the house in Emmett from which the girl had disappeared — Smith’s house.

The body was later identified as Taryn Summers, based on DNA evidence, according to August court testimony from an investigator with the Gem County Sheriff’s Office, Lt. Jason McIntosh.

Two siblings of Taryn’s were reported as runaways in 2020, and the Sheriff’s Office has said that law enforcement and family members have since made contact with them.

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Exactly what happened to Taryn remains unclear.

On April 12, a preschool teacher named Mattea Smith saw Taryn sitting in the back of the Lexus when Connie Smith drove to the Emmett preschool to pick up a different child, according to the teacher’s court testimony in August.

Smith told the court she heard Connie Smith tell other children in the car to be “very quiet” because Taryn was sleeping.

Later that same day, McIntosh responded to a report of a runaway at Smith’s house in Emmett. Smith told him that Taryn had disappeared from her room. Smith told McIntosh that she had “adopted (Taryn), or something like that,” he said in court. A probable cause affidavit signed by McIntosh identified Smith as the grandmother of “TS,” who was found inside the Lexus.

Smith also told McIntosh that Taryn had, at some point, defecated on the carpet in her room. Unable to clean up the mess, Smith told him she had cut out the carpeting and burned it in her backyard. She said she could not find the keys to the Lexus, which was parked in front of the home.

A search for Taryn covered multiple days before a patrol sergeant with the Idaho State Police found a set of keys on top of a cabinet in Smith’s kitchen and used them to open the Lexus on April 15. After searching the trunk, another state trooper, Detective Sgt. Jason Horst, opened a back door and found a black trash bag.

“I kind of got that feeling of what I’d find when I opened it,” he told the court. “I immediately thought that it was the body of Taryn Summers.”

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Information on the cause of Taryn’s death has not been released. The probable cause affidavit said vomit was discovered on Taryn’s shirt and in her hair during an autopsy.

In January, when mediation was scheduled, Gem County Prosecuting Attorney Erick Thomson told District Judge Gene Petty that the state planned to “change charges and charging language in this case.”

The crime of felony injury to child, which was added to the case on Tuesday, is described under state law as a person who puts a child “under circumstances or conditions likely to produce great bodily harm or death, willfully causes or permits any child to suffer, or inflicts thereon unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering, or having the care or custody of any child, willfully causes or permits the person or health of such child to be injured, or willfully causes or permits such child to be placed in such situation that its person or health is endangered.”

On Wednesday, Thomson said the state has information about the death but will not discuss it until sentencing.

“I know everyone wants to know what happened here, and that’s not at this point in the proceedings appropriate for me to go into,” he told the Idaho Statesman.

A sentencing hearing for Smith is scheduled for April 8. She is in the custody of the Gem County Jail on an $800,000 bond.

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