Former amateur MMA fighter Robert S. Buskey Jr. pleaded guilty Jan. 23 to second-degree murder and a drug charge after prosecutors said his 5-year-old daughter, Charlotte, died of starvation and dehydration in his Schenectady home in 2024.
The plea moved one of Schenectady’s most disturbing child death cases to its final stage. Under the agreement, Buskey is set to receive 27 years to life when he returns to court March 27, and an order of protection is expected to bar contact with his surviving son. The case also renewed attention to how long Charlotte and her younger brother had been isolated inside the Elmer Avenue home before police arrived and what the public record still does not explain about their final months there.
Police said the case broke open about 3 a.m. on April 14, 2024, when a caller reported that a 5-year-old girl at 203 Elmer Ave. was unconscious and not breathing. Officers and paramedics arrived together. Schenectady Police Officer Nolan Carroll later said the child was already dead when first responders reached her. Court papers filed soon after the call accused Buskey of depriving Charlotte of food and water from April 10 through April 14. He was first charged with second-degree manslaughter and child endangerment, and officers stayed at the two-family home into the next day while crime scene tape remained around the front of the property. At that stage, police said the investigation was still active and warned that more charges could follow as detectives worked through the scene and interviews.
Prosecutors later said the evidence inside the home showed far more than a short final burst of neglect. In announcing the plea, the district attorney’s office said first responders entered what it called a house of horrors. In the dining room, investigators found a makeshift cage where Buskey’s 3-year-old son had been kept. In Buskey’s bedroom, they found Charlotte’s emaciated body. Prosecutors said Buskey had installed a lock on the outside of her bedroom door and reinforced it with tape after learning she could open it by jiggling the handle. Inside the room, they said, she had no bed and only a pack-and-play so small she was forced to curl up inside it. Food was elsewhere in the house, including boxes just outside the locked bedroom door. The autopsy, prosecutors said, found severe dehydration and no food in her body. Both children also tested positive for cocaine, and Buskey admitted giving a narcotic to his son.
Officials said the conditions that led to Charlotte’s death had been building for months. Prosecutors said Charlotte and her brother had become increasingly cut off from the outside world. They no longer saw family, no longer attended doctor appointments and were not enrolled in school, according to the district attorney’s account of the investigation. Their lives, prosecutors said, had narrowed to the rooms inside the Elmer Avenue house. Charlotte’s final days were spent alone behind a locked door, while her younger brother was kept separately in the cage found by first responders. The district attorney’s office said Buskey kept the children that way so he could use drugs, play video games and avoid being bothered by them. Public reporting has filled in pieces of the case, but major gaps remain. The public record still does not show precisely when outside systems last had direct contact with the children or whether anyone beyond the home recognized how sharply their world had closed in.
The criminal case widened in the weeks after Charlotte’s death. By late May 2024, a grand jury had returned an 11-count indictment that elevated the case from manslaughter to second-degree murder and added drug, tampering and child endangerment counts. Buskey pleaded not guilty at his June 14, 2024 arraignment and remained jailed without bail. The prosecution was not limited to him. On June 3, 2024, Brandi Terhune, Buskey’s former girlfriend, was charged with tampering with physical evidence and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Prosecutors said she lived at the home and tried to conceal cocaine during the period around Charlotte’s death. Terhune later accepted a plea deal in 2025 that resolved the felony tampering charge and two misdemeanor child endangerment counts under a recommendation that called for probation rather than prison. Her case added another layer to a prosecution that had already grown from a predawn emergency call into a broader look at the conditions inside the house.
When Buskey returned to court on Jan. 23, 2026, the case ended without a trial. Before Schenectady County Judge Matthew J. Sypniewski, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and criminal sale of a controlled substance to a child. As part of the deal, he waived his right to appeal. The agreement calls for the maximum sentence allowed by law on the murder conviction, 25 years to life, plus an additional two years on the drug conviction, for an aggregate sentence of 27 years to life. Chief of the Homicide Bureau Christina Tremante-Pelham said the plea “rightfully gives this defendant the maximum punishment allowed by law for the murder of his daughter.” District Attorney Robert M. Carney said the second-degree murder count reflected a depraved indifference to human life, a standard reserved for conduct showing what prosecutors described as an utter disregard for the value of a child’s life.
The case drew unusual attention not only because of the allegations but because of the ordinary setting in which they unfolded. Local coverage the day after Charlotte’s death described an otherwise typical residential block, a two-family house, porch steps and the remnants of police tape. Carroll said at the time that Buskey’s son had been removed and was safe with other family members. That contrast between a familiar neighborhood scene and the conditions described by prosecutors helped drive public reaction in Schenectady. Carney later tied Charlotte’s death to another 2024 child murder case in the city as he spoke about the grief left behind by both prosecutions. Buskey’s background as a former amateur mixed martial arts competitor gave the story another public hook, but in court the case turned on something more basic and devastating: a dead child, a locked bedroom, a surviving son and the state’s claim that the conduct met the high threshold for depraved indifference murder.
Buskey has remained in custody since his arrest in April 2024, and the next courtroom step is formal sentencing on March 27, 2026, at 9:30 a.m. The order of protection barring contact with his son is expected to be issued at that hearing as part of the plea agreement. By then, most of the core factual disputes in the case will already be closed. There will be no jury trial and no full public airing of witnesses before jurors because the plea resolved the top charges. What remains is the final pronouncement of punishment in a case that began with a call about an unresponsive child and ended with a father admitting guilt to murder and to giving drugs to a child inside the same home.
For now, the case stands where it has since the plea: Buskey in county custody, a 27-years-to-life sentence set by agreement, and a March 27 hearing expected to close the criminal case while leaving the questions around the children’s isolation as part of the public record.
Author note: Last updated March 7, 2026.