Petition started to create ‘Miya’s Law’ after 8-month-old found dead

OHIO CO., Ky. (WFIE) - Since the discovery of 8-month-old Miya Rudd’s remains in her parents’ Reynolds Station home last Friday, questions surrounding the case have continued flying around.

[PREVIOUS: Remains found concealed inside family home of baby Miya Rudd, says KSP]

Like so many others, Eric Williams says he waited as Kentucky State Police searched day after day for missing baby Miya.

When it was revealed that her body was found in her parents home, wrapped in plastic and a blanket under debris, it got Williams and others thinking:

‘How was she allowed to be taken home from the hospital if her three older siblings had already been taken away from her parents by the state and placed with family?’

“I can’t go buy a car if I didn’t pay for my last car, can I? Right? I can’t go adopt a dog if I was found of animal abuse, but how come I can leave with a brand new baby when I lost my previous ones?” questions Williams.

Despite having no relation to the family or this case, Williams was compelled to take action.

“We know sources are limited. We know the state and local government resources have, you know, constraints that they’re fighting against, but we make exceptions for things we can do,” says Williams. “We try to resolve things the best we can, and I just didn’t feel like this was something we could slack on.”

Thus, his petition advocating for “Miya’s Law,” was born.

The idea, according to Williams, is to prevent parents who have lost custody of previous children and not been able to regain it from taking home newborns.

According to the petition, there needs to be a plan in place to make sure these parents are able to pass drug tests and court ordered programs to gain custody of their children back.

With nearly 3,000 signatures at last check, Williams says he doesn’t know what will come of it just yet.

However, it’s clear to him that he and several others have the same goal.

“I just want them to make the law. I mean, you can never be 100% right? You can’t fix everything,” he says. “There’s always going to be things that fall through the cracks. There’s going to be issues, but situations like this where this clearly should not have happened, it has to be an everybody, kind of community effort to say, ‘no, that’s not okay.’”

As we’ve reported, Kentucky State Police say Miya’s umbilical cord did test positive for meth, but they say the results of that test administered when she was born didn’t come back for a week or so.

At that point, they believe social services were looking to remove Miya, but that never happened.

District 14 Kentucky General Assembly Representative Scott Lewis says he and some other folks at the state level are already working on something to strengthen child protection laws once they get back into session.

“If there’s something we can do to strengthen those laws, we will,” says Lewis.

14 News also asked the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services a list of questions regarding Miya’s case on Wednesday last week.

We’ve been told three times they’re “working on it,” but we have yet to receive any answers.

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