Former University of Kentucky cheerleader Laken Snelling pleaded guilty Friday morning to manslaughter charges for killing her newborn son and stuffing his lifeless body in a trash bag.
Snelling, now 22, entered the plea in a Kentucky courtroom after initially pleading not guilty last April to charges of abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence and concealing the birth of an infant. Prosecutors have recommended a 10-year prison term for manslaughter, plus one year each for the three lesser charges.
Lexington police responded to an off-campus home on Aug. 27, after her horrified college roommates discovered the boy in a black plastic bag stuffed in a closet, finding the child unresponsive. The Kentucky Medical Examiner’s Office concluded the baby was born alive and died of asphyxia by undetermined means, after which a grand jury indicted her on first-degree manslaughter charges in March.
In an interview with police, Snelling initially claimed the baby had fallen on the floor after she gave birth, but she didn’t think he was “breathing or alive.” However, her story soon changed, claiming instead she had passed out “on top of the baby” and woke up to find him “turning blue and purple.”
In court this week, Snelling finally admitted to “ending” the baby’s life “instead of helping him” and copped to putting the infant in a plastic bag, WKYT reported.
The roommates had heard loud noises coming from Snelling’s room around 4 a.m., with one later telling police via Snapchat messages that the force had been strong enough to knock a picture off the wall. Snelling told the group chat around 9 a.m. That the noise had been her passing out from not eating, adding she would get checked by a doctor. Her roommates grew suspicious and entered her room after she left, where they found the blood-soaked towel and the plastic bag containing the newborn.
Snelling had wrapped the baby “like a burrito” in a towel and laid next to him on the floor because it “gave her a little comfort in the moment,” according to police affidavits. She then went back to sleep until her alarm went off at 7:30 a.m., at which point she cleaned up blood and afterbirth, placed the towel-wrapped baby in a trash bag and her placenta inside a zip-lock bag, which she also put in the trash bag.
After her arrest, Snelling was held at the Fayette County Detention Center but released on Sept. 2 after posting a $100,000 surety bond. She was allowed to return to Tennessee on house arrest, though a judge later modified her conditions to require GPS monitoring and confinement to her father’s home. She withdrew from the University of Kentucky days after her arrest; she had been a member of the school’s STUNT team, which finished as runners-up at the 2025 NCAA competition.
In the viral moment that sparked national attention, Snelling’s case drew particular scrutiny after it emerged she had dressed as a pregnant woman for Halloween months before the baby’s death, and that she had been dating a popular college athlete at the time. The indictment accused her of acting under “extreme emotional disturbance,” a legal classification in Kentucky that does not require psychiatric evaluation and allowed prosecutors to charge manslaughter rather than murder. Fayette Commonwealth’s Attorney Kimberly Baird told WKYT that the grand jury “were given the information about homicide, the four levels of homicide and then deliberated and decided that manslaughter first degree was the charge that should come out of the grand jury.”
Snelling is scheduled to be sentenced in Lexington.