Mario Sanchez’s heart was heavy as he sat at the park where his 6-year-old son, who was drugged to death by his mother, used to play with his younger sister.
“Man, I feel sad right now,” Sanchez told KPRC 2 as he sat at a park in southwest Houston. “We fished over there on the lake. He played over here.”
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Sanchez’s son, Jason, died last June after prosecutors say his mother, a licensed insurance agent, drugged him to death for a total of $100,000 in insurance money.
According to investigators, Jason’s mother, Ashley Marks, took out two insurance policies on his life just before they say she drugged her son.
Marks was arrested on Wednesday and is currently being held in a Harris County jail. She was charged with capital murder after investigators said they found Nyquil, methamphetamine and cocaine in Jason’s system.
Sanchez told KPRC 2 that he and Marks divorced a couple of years ago and their two children were staying with Marks’ father during the two months prior to Jason’s death.
On June 27, Marks called Sanchez to tell him that his son passed but didn’t say she had anything to do with it.
“After Jason passed, I learned that during the afternoon of June 26, 2020, Jason was hallucinating and throwing up,” Sanchez wrote in an affidavit to the court in an ongoing custody battle with his ex-wife. “No one told me about what was happening to Jason. If I would have known Jason was having health problems, I would have taken him to the doctor immediately.”
Sanchez told KPRC 2 that he wishes his ex-wife would have asked him for money instead of taking Jason’s life.
Now, the distraught father wakes up every day thinking that his son’s death was just a bad dream.
“I was thinking that it was a dream, a bad dream. I just want to wake up and say, ‘oh that was a bad dream,’” Sanchez said.