Foster Son Salt Poisoned?! The Andrew Burd Story

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel and welcome to another true crime video, so the case I'm going to tell you about today is definitely one of the strangest ones I've ever covered, it's very strange and I think people will have very opinions. found. I definitely fall somewhere in the middle of the whole situation, it's one of those cases where I don't really feel like I have a good understanding of what really happened, at the end of the day a lot of this is in the background. airy and confusing, so I definitely want to hear your thoughts personally.

I'm very curious how you guys will react to this video and this family that I'm about to tell you about this mother, her name is Hannah Overton and she is the Overtoun family Larry and Hannah are the parents and they were very good Christian parents and They got married when they were very young and lived in Corpus Christi Texas and had a big heart for children and were also a very religious family. They were very devoted to their faith and Christianity, they actually did missionary work for a few years, they were definitely considered really good people because they did a lot to contribute through their church and Hannah Overton had actually been doing volunteer work for a long time. her life, even when she was a teenager, she used to spend her vacations volunteering at an orphanage across the border in Reynosa.

She spent much of her time helping feed children living on the streets, bathing, and ministering, and in addition to this, she had even spent several years caring for special needs children who had severe disabilities. Jenna really loved children and she specifically told her husband that one day in the future she wanted to adopt a child, specifically a child who had some type of disability or problem that they might have. could help guide you, as you can see, Hannah was a pretty good person, as the people around her knew her as a very, very good person, so after Hannah and Larry got married, they had four children and after having their fourth child they began to think about the possibility of adopting a fifth child and this was something Hannah always wanted to do.

She always knew that she wanted to be a mother to several different children and she wanted them not to all be her actual biological children. In 2005, Hannah and Larry decided to start taking the whole adoption process much more seriously, they really tried to make sure that everyone was aligned to adopt a child into their family and they actually found a girl who was nine years old and deaf. So she fit in perfectly. Hannah wanted a child with disabilities, so they were very excited, but when they put everything they know into the process, which is a huge process, adoption is a long, crazy, difficult, confusing, stressful process.

Once they got through all of that towards the end of the process to be able to adopt, they actually lost this little girl because she was adopted by a different family, which is good, but he was a little annoying to them, but they still wanted to go. Go ahead with the idea of ​​adopting, as I mentioned, they were a Christian family and so much so that Larry actually taught a children's Sunday school program and Hannah taught a Bible study, so they were very devout and their children were very involved as well. in the church. Also, not long after they lost the first girl they tried to adopt, they ended up meeting a little boy at their church who was a

foster

child and his

foster

family attended church and were looking for someone to adopt him.

His name was Andrew Bird, so Andrew had a speech delay and spoke very softly, he even spoke a little with a stutter at times and the Overtoun family had heard that every Sunday Andrew was praying when they had their prayer requests or something like that during your Sunday school. He was praying to be adopted, so he really pulls on your heartstrings, what are you looking for, Andrews? Yes, and Overtoun's daughters were in Sunday school with him and they heard him say this and that's when they brought the idea to their parents to adopt Andrew. bird, so they started thinking about adopting Andrew, but as soon as word spread to other people in the church that they were even considering him, many warnings came from other people about his behavioral problems and now obviously There are many children in foster homes. has behavioral issues Andrews' biological mother actually gave birth to him when he was only 16 and used a variety of substances that I can't really list unless I wanted him to monetize them, but he had really abused a lot of things while he was pregnant. with Andrew Andrews, the father was also very young, he was only 17 years old and his father actually worked in a traveling fair, so he was almost never at home, a terrible situation and too young parents, so how did Andrew end up in a foster home?

Well, CP ended up launching an initial initiative. investigation when he was taken to the hospital on his first birthday for a broken arm and after this four more investigations were launched for reports of abuse and neglect, so he was just in a very bad home and apparently his grandmother also had an abuse problem of substances. So she couldn't care for Andrew either, so CPS decided it was best to get him out of the house. He was only two and a half years old when they decided he was in immediate danger and needed to be placed in foster care and his parents lost all parental rights to him shortly after he turned three, so obviously Andrew is a child who has a lot of problems, he really came from a difficult and difficult situation and tons of children in foster care have these behavioral problems because in such difficult situations before they were adopted or, you know, they ended up in a new foster home, so It is very common and people in the church warned them about it.

Andrew was actually supposed to be adopted by the church's pastor and his wife, but after they spent more time with him, they decided he was too much for them and backed out, so the Overtons decided to step forward. and try to take on the challenge of having Andrew join their family, but at the same time they made this decision Hana also became pregnant, so they are about to have six children. Andrew had all of these behavioral problems specifically, hoarding food, taking food out of the trash, storing food, trying to hide it from people, which is very, very common.

He also threw very short-tempered tantrums, I mean, he was a very angry child, a very annoying child, and on top of all this, Larry was also experiencing some financial problems. Her job really only allowed her to barely make ends meet, so they were quite limited financially and emotionally they had a lot of things to do she is pregnant they have four about to turn five about to turn six children so the stress levels The Overtoun family really felt that if anyone could raise this child and help him through his problems, it was them. Hannah truly felt that she was meant to be a mother, so in the spring of 2006 they went ahead and proceeded with the adoption process.

Andrew was going to live with them for a six-month trial period before adoption. it was finalized, so that's what he was doing, so he moved in with them as foster at first. They were very excited for him to join his family, especially his children. They knew him from Sunday school and were super excited to have him as their brother. They want to tend to feel as welcome as possible, they built a three-tier bunk bed for their kids to sleep with Andrew and they also bought him a bunch of Spider-Man stuff because he loves Spider-Man, so they got him like the sheets of the Spider-Man toothbrushes cover everything like a mountain decorated with Spider-Man stuff, so he would be very excited when it came, so that year, actually, on Mother's Day, Andrew spent the first day with Overton families and became attached to them extremely quickly and soon called.

He, Hannah, Mom, Larry, Dad, and he followed Larry everywhere, he really loved Larry, he was doing great even in Sunday school. He was doing much better. They noticed in Sunday school that he seemed to be in a good home, that he seemed happier and Trusting God more to move Pastor Rod Carver and his wife Marie noticed an immediate change in Andrew if you saw him in church Andrew was always with his brothers and sisters Andrew accompanied Larry on his feet the entire time he was beginning to be able to write sentences. It's easier to put together the words you know that make sense and his adoption supervisor even noted that Andrew seemed to be in an amazing home with loving parents and even though it seemed to everyone else in Sunday School that he was doing a lot of things. improvements there were still some major problems that the Overtons were experiencing at their home, they noticed that he acted more like a toddler than a preschooler as if he was just a little behind, one of the ways was instead of using his words to say like I want him to just point to something and say, uh, and you know, a lot of younger kids do that, but that grows out of us as we get older, so he didn't do that when he was 4, he spent most of time.

During the time he spent playing with his youngest son, who was 2 years old instead of his 4-year-old son, they said that his motor skills were very delayed and that he was going to need a lot of work for a long time and that He was physically very unstable. He was very clumsy, Hannah was very worried about his safety, because he would hit something. She would make him use an inflatable life preserver that is just to go in there like a little pool for toddlers. a busy child, but his strangest behavior was his session with food and eating and this makes sense, like you, we don't know exactly what happened to him when he was in his first home, he could have been, you know, deprived of food or starving.

I have no idea what he's been through to become like this, but that's very common in foster kids, all the hoarding and eating problems in general, eating disorders, regardless of how much Andrew ate, he always said he was still hungry. if they denied it. Seconds or thirds he would throw a tantrum and get absolutely mad at them. He literally looked for crumbs on the floor. They caught him too. He tried to need strange things like cat food and Kranz toothpaste. carpet, they could barely take him to run errands because he knows how to grab things and eat random things off the shelves and not to mention he eats things in the parking lot off the floor, he would even try to pick up gum off the floor and eat that and if you think gum is bad , he was also trying to eat cigarette butts, so his problems were very deep, they took him to the doctor and they determined that it was probably not a medical problem, but was just a behavioral problem and I thought you knew that with more time, more love and Patience would outgrow it, the adoption agency had shown them many cases of children who had this problem and they overcame it, they were hoping that would happen to Andrew too, but later that year in September it would actually get worse because the family had a car accident and this really upset Andrew and just threw him off, it wasn't a terrible accident that's for sure, the only one who was really hurt was Hannah and her.

Even with that injury, she received whiplash on the neck and a bruise on her face from hitting the dashboard, but it was still upsetting for Andrew and seemed to trigger even worse behavior and after the accident, Hannah had to lie down in bed. for a few weeks and recover and this was very difficult for them because Larry actually had to work more to make up for the lost hours because they had just bought a new property and had to keep up the payments. They tried to get babysitters. and friends to come see Andrew, but in the end, all of you didn't want to come anymore because Andrew's behavior was so bad that his eating habits kept getting worse and he even started getting up in the middle of the night and One morning, when he tried take things out of the kitchen, his father Larry decided that he should have whatever breakfast he wanted and he thought that maybe he would eat his fill or maybe he would eat until he vomited and that would teach him a lesson, so Larry prepared him a plate full of sausages and a dozen eggs and apparently ate every last bite and kept eating until he finally threw up and then asked for more, so obviously this was a major problem for him as he was getting up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen they decided to end up installing a camera in his room so they could watch him during the night and on the camera they saw him trying to eat part of the foam mattress and also paint off the wall, so at this point they already know what's going on so they decided to take him to the therapist adoption and chat a little and that's when the supervisor suggested that Andrew might have something called pica, which is Something that's always fascinated me is basically when you crave things that aren't food.

There are many people who have this. I've watched a lot of TLC shows.shy that I didn't even say goodbye to the children in the morning, they could acquit her completely or send her and her wife to prison. A really intense choice. Larry Overton was also accused of murder, but after his wife's conviction he was offered a plea deal and given probation and after he was put on probation his charges were completely dismissed so Hanna was sent to prison for life and Larry was forced to raise his five children alone, which was extremely stressful for him and he was also really very hard on his poor children, I know how, I don't know how we managed to survive so long on this farm, but we have .

I've had moments where I feel great and I feel like I can't do this anymore. It took me about three years. before I could go back to sleep in our room and it's been hard I don't know if you get used to it I think you get drowsy there are little things that most people take for granted when you receive the hug your mom helps you with your homework and things that I miss when she used to lie me on my bed every time and how she used to play with me. I get three contact visits with her, which means I can sit across from her at the table, hold her hand, but the kids, the kids can only talk. to her through bulletproof glass and over the phone, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't?

Isabel is getting to that age where I'm out of shoes and I can't grow up the same. She taught me how to comb my hair I had to teach Emma how to comb her hair It's just that I have to do some of my mother's work She hits her mother She does it how did you deal with that? You know Hannah was built being a mother she loved being a mother and now she was watching her children grow up from prison not knowing if she would ever get to see some of the most important moments of their lives, but the more people looked at her case, the more they realized that The sentence was really so Hannah and her defense team decided that they were going to appeal the sentence and people in this community were really polarized about the situation somewhere where I am, which is why I'm so curious what you guys they think about all this stuff that I am, so I don't know, a lot of people firmly believed that she was innocent and would never do something like this and then a lot of people think that maybe she did it because of the interviews with Hannah.

He doesn't seem like someone who would do this to me, because of his actions in his life and his charitable donations, he doesn't seem like someone who would do something like this, but there are so many weird little things like the sheets, the bed, and the sippy glass full of the condiment he gave her. It gives people a reason to be that way, but is that enough to convict someone of murder and sentence them to life in prison? It's pretty intense, so the church her family attended definitely got involved in this and really got behind it.

With her they ended up raising a million dollars for her defense and on top of this three different lawyers who were considered some of the best in the state of Texas ended up working for her for free and during the appeals trial one of the prosecutors who originally testified against Hannah They ended up changing positions and testifying on behalf of her and one of Hannah's lawyers, Cynthia, or they made a big discovery and ended up coming across documents that showed that the contents of Andrew's stomach did not actually have a high amount of

salt

when At the care clinic, they actually only included the blood sodium levels from his blood tests, not the

salt

in his stomach.

She also had scratches and bruises all over her body, I think the prosecution used them to illustrate her claim that Hannah was somehow abusive and the reason why. that the emergency physicians did not make the diagnosis and continued to administer sodium for an hour and a half before determining that there was still hypernatremia from this high sodium content. Morris, if you had been called to testify, what the jury said causes the blood to stop clotting and therefore, with a child like this, any scratch, any minor injury is going to bleed and not just any kind of minor blow. is going to cause bleeding under the skin resulting in bruising, so you can imagine with the heroic life saving efforts that were made with Andrew, he was being more than just beaten and scratched in the move, he had tubes, he had clips, they did CPR on him and everything was leaving bruises and scratching him so that the doctors who didn't understand him would think they were seeing an abused child and they weren't, he also discovered that there were no signs of dehydration or lack of water, which is something you would do if you were trying to poison him.

Someone with salt like you probably wouldn't give soup because it contains a lot of water and if you want someone to die from salt, you would want them to have no water and in the first child, a dog, you would give them that. Andrew had shown a lot of different signs of abuse on his body, but they realized that a lot of these marks, like he had bruises and kinds of bumps and stuff, they realized that a lot of these didn't happen, it actually got to the point. hospital. most of them were done by the hospital staff trying to save his life, I mean, they're poking him, giving him IVs, moving him around and stuff, and he had this salt problem that makes the blood pool and gives him a bruise, so it looked like he was in pretty bad condition once his body got to the medical examiner, so at the appeals trial Hanna's defense team basically argued that Andrew probably ate a lot of salt when he found him in the pantry eating baking supplies, it was probably oversalted because there was That eating disorder might seem crazy for someone to eat that much salt like that, it would be really gross, but if you have that disorder, you can have a disorder, you don't care about the taste, but you just you're doing it, there's definitely a good chance. who might have had this, many children in foster care have this disorder.

Consult the medical literature. There are reports of that and ingesting too much salt can be quite dangerous and deadly. How does it kill you? Salt poisoning. Our bodies regulate salt very precisely and if you eat too much salt the blood level rises which can cause bleeding in the brain, seizures, coma and death and can be extremely difficult to treat, although I really question all decisions of upbringing they take. It was like 24 hours before Andrew died and I think there are some strange things for sure. I definitely don't think there is enough to sentence Hannah Overton to life in prison for murder.

I don't think she killed Andrew Bird on purpose, so the state Court of Justice criminal appeals ended up overturning her conviction in 2014, which was absolutely unbelievable to her, you're free to go, that's what the prosecutor said. District Attorney Mark Gonzalez told Hannah Overton today. Good night all. I'm Joe Gage. I have two of art. after serving seven years behind bars accused of killing her adopted son Overton was formally found not guilty of all charges today Hannah Overton is a free woman dad I don't even know where to start Wednesday Overton celebrated with friends and family in the lobby of the County Court Noises I am so excited for this day to finally come.

Overton was convicted in 2007 of the death of her four-year-old adopted son, Andrew Burt. It's still a little overwhelming the last time I was in that courtroom I was in shackles so I walked. I was still pretty scared and I mean, it's amazing, but it's still a little overwhelming. I think it will take a while to sink in. The state appeals court ruled that her legal defense was ineffective and sent the case back to Nueces County, where it was dropped. District Attorney Mark Gonzales says that in his opinion, Overton should never have been found guilty of the charges, many times you have to look beyond what may seem politically and do the right thing that the law says a man is supposed to do. district attorney should not only seek convictions but seek justice and rarely can you see that in all that time Overton says he never lost his faith in God it is wonderful to be home with my family it has been very busy and exciting it is difficult because the transition is difficult and then everything I've been through takes its toll on me, but that's good.

She spent seven years in prison, which is still a lot, but after all this time she was finally able to get out and reconnect with her husband and her five children. Most recently, in March 2018, Hanna was awarded over $600,000 welcome back. The state of Texas has given more than half a million dollars to the woman who was once convicted of murdering her adopted son. The Texas comptroller's office told Christic that they had sent a check to Hanna Overton for more than five hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars, plus starting next March Overton will receive a check for two thousand six hundred dollars from the state each month for the rest of her life in 2007.

Overton was convicted of capital murder for After the salt poisoning death of her four-year-old adopted son, Andrew Byrd, she was sentenced to life in prison, but Overton served only seven years of that sentence. An appeals court overturned her conviction because key evidence was left out of that trial because her conviction was overturned, the state must compensate her for the time she spent in prison. Hanna also ended up having another baby in June 2018, so she has six kids again. I think this is a very strange

story

, but I don't think these people are murderers, I think. Definitely maybe they were a little lost maybe adopting Andrew wasn't the best option for them.

I definitely think some of their decisions were super strange like I said, but I really want to know what you guys think of this case. I just don't. I don't think there's enough evidence to prove that Hanna intentionally did something as strange as giving her son a sippy cup full of water and condiments because I really think there's a good chance that while Hanna was sleeping, Andrew was sleeping. out. and I got and ate a lot of salt and you know another thing to point out is that if your son has these problems then you probably shouldn't sleep while he can go to the kitchen and do something like that because that shows the dangers something like that can be so, if anything, I think there are some really serious parenting mistakes here, just mistakes that a lot of parents could have made and especially under the stress that they were under, you know they were having financial stress, she has six kids, six and she just had car accident, she is in a lot of pain so I think mistakes definitely happened, it's a very sad

story

although it seems like Andrew had a short and horrible life and I feel very sorry for him in this situation.

I also feel sorry for Hanna for having to spend seven years in jail. I mean, that's crazy. I really don't think she did this on purpose, but I'm dying to know what the guys think of her. Let me know in a comment below. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't. already so you don't miss any more videos of mine and hit the notification bell so you definitely don't miss it, although that never works anyway ever, but that's all for me today guys, I hope you're having a great day and I . I'll talk to you next time