The 22-year-old beauty queen is accused of killing her newborn child after giving birth in the bedroom of her off-campus home during the first week of classes at the University of Kentucky in Aug. 2025.
Laken Snelling appeared in a Kentucky courtroom on Friday morning and pleaded not guilty to manslaughter, News.Az reports, citing People.
Snelling arrived in court flanked by her two lawyers and said nothing during her brief appearance, with one of her lawyers entering a plea on her behalf.
She previously pleaded not guilty at her September arraignment to three additional charges a grand jury indicted her on in March: abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence, and concealing the birth of an infant.
During her Friday court appearance, Snelling left the courtroom after just a few minutes, and is scheduled to return on May 14 for a preliminary hearing and again on June 12 for a status hearing.
Officers with the Lexington Police Department (LPD) were dispatched to Snelling’s off-campus home on the morning of Aug. 27, 2025, after her concerned roommates called to say they had found blood in her bedroom, and reported hearing strange noises coming from Snelling’s area of the house earlier that day, according to a copy of the arrest report .
Once on the scene, officers allegedly discovered a deceased newborn wrapped in a towel and placed in a trash bag inside of Snelling’s bedroom closet.
The LPD later said in a news release that an autopsy determined the infant’s cause of death to be “asphyxia by undetermined means.”
Snelling was not home at the time, and according to the arrest report had allegedly left her off-campus home to attend class just a few hours after giving birth.
Officers were able to track Snelling down soon after and took her to receive medical treatment at the university hospital after placing her under arrest.
While at the hospital, Snelling opted to waive her Miranda rights and speak with police, according to a pair of search warrant affidavits.
She then proceeded to tell an officer from the LPD that at 4 a.m. on Aug. 27, she gave birth “to a baby which fell onto the floor of her bedroom,” according to the affidavits.
After giving birth, she said that she stayed awake for another 30 minutes before “falling on top of the baby and going back to sleep,” according to the affidavits.
Snelling said that when she next woke up her newborn was “turning blue and purple.”
Snelling allegedly told the officer that she then wrapped her baby in a towel “like a burrito” and laid next to the newborn on the floor of her bedroom.
She said that this “gave her a little comfort in the moment,” according to the affidavits.
Snelling then went back to sleep until her alarm went off at 7:30 a.m., the affidavits alleged, at which point she cleaned up the blood and afterbirth in her bedroom, placed the towel-wrapped baby in a trash bag and her placenta “inside of a zip lock bag,” which she also put in the trash bag.After her arrest, Snelling was held at the Fayette County Detention Center but released on Sept. 2 after posting a $100,000 surety bond.
Despite facing charges in Kentucky, Snelling was allowed to return home to Tennessee as a condition of her pre-trial release.
A judge initially approved a motion allowing her to split her time between her mother and father’s homes in Tennessee, but that arrangement was later changed a month into her release, and Snelling was ordered to wear a GPS monitoring device and remain at her father’s home.Snelling withdrew from the University of Kentucky a few days after her arrest, a school spokesperson told PEOPLE.
Prior to that, she had been a member of the school’s STUNT team, which finished as runners-up at the 2025 NCAA competition.
Snelling is also a decorated beauty queen who competed in pageants up until the time of her arrest.
Her lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
