A young Idaho woman who survived heinous crimes as a child at the hands of convicted murderer Joseph Duncan has recently been in trouble with the law for exposing two young children to danger.
21-year-old Shasta Groene pleaded guilty in April in Canyon County to two misdemeanor counts of injury to a child, and was ordered to serve unsupervised probation through October 2019. Court records say she endangered a 1-year-old child in her custody by leaving methamphetamine where he could ingest it, and that she also left the drug in close proximity to a month-old baby. Groene was accused of violating the terms of her probation just a month later.
Groene became a household name nationwide in 2005, after Duncan broke into her family’s Coeur d’Alene-area home, killed her mother, stepfather, and older brother, and abducted a then-8-year-old Shasta and her 9-year-old brother Dylan. Duncan killed Dylan at a Montana campsite. He then took Shasta to a restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, where a waitress recognized the girl and called police.
Groene has talked in the past about struggles with drug use, including during an interview with KHQ television in 2015, in which she described the details of dealing with her experiences and the aftermath. Groene’s lawyer says she has since made an effort to change, finding full-time employment, and consistently producing clean drug tests.
Meanwhile, Duncan is currently on death row in federal prison for the Idaho crimes. He is also serving 11 consecutive sentences of life without parole for those crimes and the 1997 murder of a California boy. Duncan also confessed to the 1996 murder of two Seattle girls, but no charges have been filed. (Idaho Statesman)
