A former MMA fighter pleaded guilty last week to second degree murder in the death of his 5-year-old daughter, who was found dead stuffed into a pack-and-play so small she lay in it in a fetal position.
That’s where Charlotte Buskey spent her last days, locked in the bedroom with no food, no water, and no contact with the outside world, the Daily Voice reported.
Her then-3-year-old brother was also cut off, kept in a cage in the dining room in a home the Schenectady County District Attorney’s Office described as a “house of horrors.”
Investigators accused Robert Buskey Jr, 35, of neglecting the children for months.
“Charlotte, whom he had entombed in her bedroom until she died of dehydration and starvation,” said Schenectady County District Attorney Robert Carney. “Their world shrunk to the confines of Mr. Buskey’s deplorable home.”
When investigators were called to the house for an “unresponsive child” in April 2024, they found it “stocked with food,” including unopened boxes stacked right outside Charlotte’s locked bedroom door.
Charlotte’s body was so dehydrated that he eyes were sunk into her skull, and an autopsy found no food whatseover in her body.
Buskey also pleaded guilty to giving his son cocaine. He is expected to be sentenced to 25 years on the murder charge and two years on the drug charge. Both Charlotte and her brother tested positive for the drug. Sentencing is set for March, WRGB said.
According to the Times-Union, he is forbidden from any contact with his son, now the same age as Charlotte when he killed her.
Buskey was an amateur MMA fighter in New York, fighting his last fight in 2019. He also fought a single kickboxing match in 2022.
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[Featured image: Robert Buskey Jr/Schenectady County Sheriff’s Office]