Shane McLaughlin, 37, was arrested last week on manslaughter charges after his 13-month-old daughter died of hypothermia in their freezing Maine home.
The Milford father was taken into custody Wednesday and booked into Penobscot County Jail following a medical examiner’s ruling that little Eleanora Ray McLaughlin succumbed to the cold last December, according to the Maine Department of Public Safety. He is expected to appear at the Penobscot Judicial Center, though attorney information was not immediately available.
McLaughlin had spoken to NEWS CENTER Maine shortly after the tragedy, offering his account of that morning. He said he noticed the room where he and his children slept — heated by a single space heater — had grown bitterly cold after a pet left a door open, to the point where he could see his own breath.
“I grabbed a package of Pop-Tarts, opened it up, and I went to wake up Eleanora, and that’s when I found her dead,” he told the station.
The child’s mother, Erika Dupuis, had been living apart from the family since the summer of 2025, when she moved to West Virginia and left her children behind. In her own interview with the same station, Dupuis expressed frustration that charges had not come sooner.
She was “angry and upset” her husband had not been arrested, and she stated plainly that she hoped to see manslaughter charges filed against McLaughlin.
Maine State Sen. Jeff Timberlake, a Republican, had obtained records showing the family had drawn repeated attention from state authorities. He told NEWS CENTER Maine that officials from the Department of Health and Human Services had investigated the couple before Eleanora’s death.
McLaughlin confirmed to the outlet that he and Dupuis had been investigated several times since 2017, though he disputed the investigators’ conclusions.
Timberlake did not hold back after learning of the arrest. “I don’t know what took so long,” he said. He added that the charge was “about time.”
The circumstances around exactly how Eleanora was left in conditions cold enough to kill her remain unclear from official accounts, though McLaughlin’s description of seeing his own breath suggests temperatures had fallen dangerously low in the room where his children slept.
The case has drawn scrutiny not only for the child’s death but for the trail of prior state involvement that failed to prevent it.