“Survival of the Fittest” Dad Starves His “100 Year Old Baby”

“Survival of the Fittest” Dad Starves His “100 Year Old Baby”

Marianne Welch was born on October 23, 2017, to parents Seth Welch and Tatiana Fusari of Solon Township, Michigan. She weighed 6 pounds and 14 ounces at birth, which took place at home. The couple already had two children: a two-year-old son named John and a four-year-old daughter named Elizabeth. Pictures of Mary show her dressed in pretty pink outfits, cuddling a tabby cat. According to her mother, Mary was a normal baby who was able to push up with her arms and look around during tummy time on her play mat. She’d lift her head up and watch her older siblings playing, or would roll over on her back to reach for the rainbow toys dangling over her head, giggling and happy. She also had a polar bear stuffy that she liked to play with before bed.

Tatiana was a native New Yorker who moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to reconnect with her mother, but that proved to be in vain when her mother kicked her out. She was studying early childhood development at Grand Rapids Community College and had hopes of starting her own daycare. It was there that she met Seth Welch in September of 2011. According to Tatiana, he was “charming, engaging, flirtatious. I was new, I didn’t know anybody, so it was nice to have someone engage me.” They moved in together after one date, but according to Tatiana, Seth became demanding and controlling early on in their relationship. Despite this, the couple were married in March of 2015.

After she became pregnant with their first child, Elizabeth, the couple bought a farm together near Cedar Springs in Solon Township. There, they ran Black Acre Farm Products—later renamed Stewards of Creation—selling honey, maple syrup, and homegrown fruits and vegetables, which they also used to feed their family. Eventually, they had their second child named John. Seth and Tatiana were deeply religious and had hand-painted signs nailed to fences and trees surrounding their farm with sayings such as, “Repent, Believe, Obey,” “God knows what you need before you ask him,” and “Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess to God.”

Seth often posted pictures of these signs on his Facebook page, along with picture after picture of highlighted verses in his Bible. He also liked to go on rants. “I’m gonna do whatever we gotta do,” he said in one. Welch has posted more than a hundred hours of video on his Facebook page, stating, “This doesn’t fit in with my worldly brain.” His page was filled with bizarre rants against the government, the Harry Potter series, and even Disney characters. He would also read from the Bible: “I’d like to start with the scriptures.”

The couple chose to homeschool their children and were deeply suspicious of the medical system. Only their oldest child, Elizabeth, had ever been to a medical doctor. The couple were reported to Child Protective Services (CPS) in 2014 because THC was found in Elizabeth’s system when she was born. They also refused to use a cranial molding helmet for Elizabeth as recommended by their doctor. Seth later claimed that doctors forged documents against him in order to make a bogus CPS claim, stating that all Elizabeth had was a cough. This seemed to be a part of a pattern Seth had for mistrusting medical professionals. He claimed that CPS was called on him just for changing physicians, so at that point, he was “done with medical doctors” in his own words. Tatiana only had home births after that, which Seth bragged about, saying that “gravity just shoots the baby right down,” and that they have a midwife come in “to do the dirty work that anybody could do.”

Regarding his viewpoints on vaccines, Seth stated: “It didn’t seem smart that you would be saving people who weren’t the fittest. If evolution believes in survival of the fittest, why are we vaccinating everybody? Shouldn’t we just let the weak die off and let the strong survive?”

Unfortunately, the controlling behavior that Seth exhibited earlier in their relationship only worsened. According to Tatiana, Seth was an aggressive and abusive husband who once pointed an AK-47 at her head and nearly shot her when he accidentally fired the gun. She claimed he sexually assaulted her, beat her, and threatened to kill her if she ever cheated on him. While she was pregnant with her youngest child, Seth tried to perform an exorcism on her, smacking her between the shoulders with an open hand, reading Bible verses aloud, and saying, “Demon, be gone.”

In April of 2018, Tatiana began working a second shift at McDonald’s, so Seth was in charge of caring for their three children and tending to the farm. Little did she know, just a few months later, tragedy would strike.

The 911 Call

On August 2nd, 2018, Seth called 911 to report that they had found 10-month-old Mary dead in her crib. His voice had no sense of urgency as he said, “I don’t know if this is the right place to report this to. One of my children is dead.” The dispatcher asked how long ago he had found the child, to which Seth responded it had been about an hour and a half—which was not true at all. It was later determined that Mary had been dead for more than two hours. He told the dispatcher that he had called his lawyer first thing to ask what he should do, and then called the police while waiting for his legal counsel to arrive. It should be noted that his lawyer was his own father.

The dispatcher reiterated that Seth had found the child an hour and a half before and had called his lawyer first before calling 911, which Seth confirmed. The dispatcher asked him when was the last time he had contact with his child, and Seth told them it had been the day before at about 3:00 PM when he put her to bed. He said that around 10:00 AM the next morning, he decided to go check on her because it had been “way too long.” Knowing that this was utterly ridiculous, the dispatcher asked Seth if it was normal for his children to sleep from 3:00 PM to 10:00 AM the following day.

The dispatcher then asked Seth if he thought the child was beyond help when he found her, and he replied, “Oh yeah, she was dead as a doorknob.” When the dispatcher asked how Seth was holding up, he said, “You know, just another day. It is what it is.” Tatiana had apparently attempted to resuscitate the child after they woke up to find her dead, and she told the dispatcher during the call that Mary was cold and not breathing.

The dispatcher was a total rockstar in asking probing questions. He was actually able to make a case against Seth for the future:

Seth: “…It’s about an hour and a half. I was waiting, I called my lawyer first thing to ask, you know, what’s the next thing I could do. And I said, wait till they’re here to call, you know, the police and get that going. Basically got the point where I was with someone, I just kind of went ahead and did it anyway… so I just, I was waiting on legal counsel.” Dispatcher: “So you found the child an hour and a half ago? And called your lawyer first?” Seth: “Correct, yeah.” Dispatcher: “Okay. Are there any other children in the home right now? Okay, well we will send someone out and we’re going to investigate. When was the last time you had contact with the child?” Seth: “All last night… yesterday afternoon about 3:00 PM. And you know, she goes to bed and you know, that was that.” Dispatcher: “You put her to bed yesterday at 3:00 PM? And then this morning at like…” Seth: “10:00 something, we finally went in. Like okay, it’s been way too long. So um, you know, they do this all the time normally.” Dispatcher: “So you’re saying it is normal for your children to sleep from around 3:00 PM until 10:00 AM?” Seth: “Uh, you know, usually about 9:00, 9:30, yeah… This one instance, they don’t all kind of run on a schedule, but she, you know, eventually gets… I mean, you know, after a half hour after that, you don’t account for that.” Dispatcher: “And how old are the other children?” Seth: “Four and two.” Dispatcher: “When you found her, she was already believed to be deceased, right? And that’s when you consulted with a lawyer. The man believes she was beyond help already?” Seth: “Oh yeah, yeah.”

The Investigation

Sheriff’s deputies responded to the family’s home on Algoma Avenue, where Mary was pronounced dead at the scene. At the time, it was unclear what had led to the baby’s death. Seth was cooperative with police and was willing to let them search the home, but they declined in order to wait for a search warrant.

What investigators did find once they searched the home was appalling. At the time of Mary’s death, the house was filthy, buzzing with flies, and had mouse feces throughout. Mary’s crib mattress was torn, stained, and the back was covered in mold. There were packages of food in the kitchen, but limited baby food. Three containers of baby formula were found in the home, two of which were expired.

Like he did with most things, Seth took to Facebook to announce the death of his child. He wrote: “Heart is about shattered right now. Woke up to find Mary dead in her bed this morning. This evening had our children removed and placed on a no contact because Taddy and I are the worst parents ever.”

During his initial police interview, Seth looked bored and impatient. While waiting in the interrogation room, he showed absolutely no sign of grieving his daughter. Instead, he slouched in his chair, paced around the room, and spent long minutes examining, picking, and nibbling at his fingernails. At another point, he seemed to scratch his legs and then his groin, then sniffed his fingers and chuckled to himself before resuming his bored nail nibbling. He also spent a lot of time playing on his phone.

When investigators finally came in to interview Seth, he spent the initial portion complaining about his history with medical doctors treating him and Tatiana unfairly. When asked about when he had noticed that Mary was thin, he casually said that she had been thin since she came out. When asked about food, he said that he would feed Mary tons of solid food at dinner; he would give her three or four Gerber containers. According to Seth, she’d just “wolf them right down, no problem.” He said she had begun to get solid food around April because Tatiana was pregnant again.

The first time Seth showed a hint of emotion during his interrogation was when he said they noticed Mary sleeping longer and longer in the weeks before her death—sometimes 15 to 16 hours straight—and that’s why he didn’t think anything of it on the morning of her death. He went on to say that there was never a time when he thought there was really anything wrong. He woke up around 8:00 AM that morning, did some chores, and then went back to bed. Tatiana had gone to the neighbor’s house before coming back and finally checking on Mary. She found Mary and called to Seth, who came and saw that Mary was dead. With a shrug, he said to investigators, “That was that. It’s almost like a hellish miracle because I don’t know how… I gotta remember calling like this… yeah, okay.”

An investigator responded: “Neither of us is saying that either of you don’t love your kids because it is obvious that you do. It’s obvious. But it’s also very obvious that you’re lying to us right now.”

Tatiana’s Interview & Changing Stories

In police interviews, Tatiana claimed that she had fed Mary at about 2:30 PM on August 1st before she went to work for her 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM shift at McDonald’s. Seth was responsible for watching the children in the evening and overnight. During his initial interviews, Seth claimed to have fed Mary that evening before he went back to sleep and that Tatiana would breastfeed her at night. However, investigators determined that Mary had not been given food, water, or had her diaper changed during the time before her death.

Tatiana claimed that when she got home from work around 11:30 PM that night, she looked through a hole in the door at Mary’s bedroom to check for movement but otherwise did not attend to Mary. After that, neither parent checked on Mary until late the next morning when Tatiana found her dead body.

During interviews with investigators, Tatiana admitted that Mary was thin for her age, but they weren’t concerned because her older sister Elizabeth had also been petite; Mary was just “going through a growth spurt” in her eyes. Seth said of Mary’s thinness, “It’s something that we watched, but I just didn’t let it get to me.” He said they might have been concerned if she was sickly in any way, but she was “always just skinny,” in his words.

Tatiana said that Mary was breastfed and beginning to eat solid foods, describing how she would make a nutritious meal for Mary with fruits from the garden blended with breast milk. The investigator asked, “When you look at her size and you can see every bone in her body, do you think she was healthy?” Tatiana looked upset and didn’t answer until they asked when Mary had lost that weight. Then she mumbled that it had been just the past two days. The investigator replied that he had never seen a child that skinny and asked again at what point did Tatiana notice that something was wrong. What stopped them from seeking help?

Tatiana struggled to answer but then said they’d been praying about it heavily in the past three or four days for Mary to gain weight. She said that she and Seth were very faithful and trusted that God would make it okay; they didn’t think they needed to bring Mary to a doctor. She pushed down any personal misgivings as being a lessening of her faith and thought she was being doubtful of Christ.

The investigator pressed, “Do you guys think that God doesn’t want us to use doctors?” She replied no, and agreed that God puts people in place to help, including doctors. The investigator said, “Two days ago I could have looked at this child and said she has just hours to live. At what point in this illness did you think that she could die?” Tatiana admitted that she did think that Mary could die, but she was delusional. She said, “I suppose I don’t have a good reason for you. I’m sorry.”

Despite her degree in early childhood development, Tatiana later testified that she didn’t notice that Mary was unhealthy and didn’t know why she had died. During the trial, she was questioned about this: “So what are some of the things they told you to look out for if you did have a student that came to school and had a failure to thrive type of case?” “Not eating,” Tatiana replied. “What physical characteristics?” “Thin bones, sunken in cheeks, ribs showing, thin arms.” “Did you see those things in your own child? You know that you can call 911 right?” “Yes.” “So then why not call 911 immediately when your child’s not moving? That’s what I don’t understand.” “I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer for you. I could never imagine that could happen.”

After Tatiana’s initial interview, Seth joined her in the interrogation room where they held hands. She was visibly upset, but he seemed almost nonchalant. At one point, he shrugged and said sarcastically, “Cause we’re such bad parents.” She told him that the cops focused on why it took them so long to call 911 after finding Mary dead, and he replied, “I told you like six times I was waiting for the lawyer because I knew this would happen. It’s their job to fill cells. It’s their job so they can fill two cells right now.” Tatiana then asked, “What are we going to do?” Seth looked at his fingernails some more and said, “We’ll go home and get really baked, and then I’d like to not talk any more about it today.”

Seth and Tatiana eventually admitted to police that they had noticed that Mary was skinny and underweight as early as a month before her death, but did not seek medical attention because they were worried that their children would be taken away from them.

The Autopsy & Arrest

Their distrust in medical doctors also seemed to have played a part in their lack of action. When the officer in Seth’s initial interview said that he could see all of Mary’s bones and asked if that wasn’t an alarm for them, Seth replied that he doesn’t trust the medical system. He said, “I know how they work and I know how they’re in business, and healthy people don’t make them any money.” He claimed he’d never encountered a health problem that didn’t work itself out if they were patient.

In a Facebook rant posted two weeks before Mary died, Seth described doctors as “skillful magicians and experts in charm.” In another post, he called them the “priests of the medical cult.” His rant continued: “The righteous shall live by faith. It’s God who is sovereign over disease and those sorts of things, and of course, untimely deaths.”

Seth later said to news reporters, “In the Bible it says good food is our medicine, so we fed her. We were feeding her chicken, potatoes, apples, cheese. We were giving her the good stuff. She died. It’s a tragedy. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh.” However, there was no proof that they were feeding her any of this food that he mentioned.

An autopsy revealed that Mary had died of malnutrition and dehydration, and the death was ruled a homicide. This was quite strange when they were claiming she was eating chicken and apples and things of that nature. The medical examiner found that Mary’s muscles had wasted away; she was in a state of chronic malnutrition. She was described as having sunken eyes and “looked like a 100-year-old baby.” That was the coroner’s response. The examiner said that she couldn’t crawl or lift her head; it would have taken weeks for her to get to that state.

At the time of her death, 10-month-old Mary weighed only 8 pounds—just one pound and two ounces more than she weighed at birth.

Seth Welch and Tatiana Fusari were arrested and held without bond before being charged with felony homicide in the first degree and child abuse. After their arrest, the couple’s two other children were placed in the care of Seth’s parents, and a petition was filed to terminate parental rights. Both Seth and Tatiana seemed to be baffled by their arrest. When the charge of first-degree homicide was read to them during their first court appearance, Tatiana began weeping, and Seth looked absolutely astonished, his mouth falling open in outrage when he heard that he would be facing life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Trial and Sentencing

During Seth’s trial, Assistant Kent County Prosecutor Kimberly Richardson described Mary’s death as nothing short of torture. Holding a picture of Mary’s starved body, she said, “What injury did she have? Her whole body was an injury. Her entire body was injured. Look at this poor little thing. She had no muscle. None. Her muscles were atrophied; her body ate itself.”

Prosecutors suggested that Mary’s father allowed the child to die because he considered her too small and weak to help on the farm—his own version of what he described as “natural selection.” Prosecutors also told the jury that Seth had requested medical attention for himself while he was in prison, proving his professed fear of medicine was not genuine.

From jail, Seth granted news station WOOD-TV 8 an exclusive interview: “I believe I’m being unfairly charged and being made an example of for my very strong faith.” Getting Seth Welch to share his story publicly took no convincing. “So are you saying that you had no idea before this that something was wrong with Mary?” the reporter asked. “Um, no. She was a skinny girl,” Seth replied. “I was very shocked and I went to my cell and I cried, and I cried, and I laid down flat on my face and I just cried out in prayer. I could tell from looking at Mary… I could tell because her skin was gray, her cheeks looked sunken, like they weren’t when we put her to bed. I knew she was dead. It’s dangerous to take your kid to the doctor’s office these days. She just died, sir, and we provided everything for her, and we have all the evidence to prove it.”

In June of 2020, Seth Welch was convicted in a jury trial of first-degree homicide and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He is currently imprisoned at the Macomb Correctional Facility in Lenox Township, Michigan. When the judge asked the jury foreperson for the verdict, they confirmed guilty verdicts on both felony murder and first-degree child abuse.

In 2021, Tatiana was also convicted of first-degree homicide and sentenced to life without parole. She received an additional 15 to 30 years for first-degree child abuse. Despite her claims during the trial that Seth’s abuse against her was the reason she didn’t seek medical attention for her baby, she is currently imprisoned at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility.

While awaiting trial, Tatiana gave birth to a fourth child in jail. Her two older children remain in the care of their grandparents, but the new baby boy was placed in a separate foster home. Therapists recommended that the new baby not have any contact with his older siblings, but that decision remains to be determined.

Marianne Welch’s emaciated little body was cremated, and she only had a plain granite plaque placed on her gravesite. It simply says: Marianne Welch, October 23, 2017 to August 2nd, 2018. She had no obituary, and as she was just a baby, not much is known about anything she might have grown up to enjoy. Let’s just hope that Mary’s in a better place, free of pain, with a full belly and caretakers that love her.