CAPITAL CRIME

Dad’s Girlfriend Now Charged With Murdering 5-Year-Old Samuel Olson

The coroner says the boy was killed by blunt head trauma before he was found in a hotel room.

When 5-year-old Samuel Olson’s body was found in a Texas motel room last month, his father’s girlfriend was charged with tampering with evidence of a human corpse. But on Thursday, Theresa Balboa was charged with capital murder after the coroner found that the boy died of “homicidal violence with blunt head trauma,” KPRC reported. After Samuel was reported missing, Balboa claimed his mother and a police officer picked him up from her—but there was never any evidence of that. Authorities say he had been killed weeks earlier and that Balboa and her roommate hid the body in the tub and then in a plastic bin that was found in the motel.