Mom Who Let Her 6-Year-Old Daughter Wander Onto CR 305 Is Sentenced to a Year in Prison

Circuit Judge Terence Perkins on Wednesday sentenced Sarah Anne Welker to a year in prison followed by four years on drug-offender probation. The 36-year-old mother left her 6-year-old daughter unsupervised for almost three hours until she wander unaccompanied across a gate and onto County Road 305, where she was seen flagging down passing cars for help.

The sentence is to run concurrent to a case in Volusia County where she pleaded guilty to an identical charge in October and been placed on probation.




Welker, of Zenoble Place in Palm Coast, was arrested last August on a felony count of neglect of a child. She pleaded guilty to child neglect. The 186 days she has already served at the county jail will be credited to her. She will have to serve the balance of the sentence in state prison.

When a Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy spoke to Welker’s daughter on County Road 305, the girl did not know where she was, and said she lived in two different homes, one with “Mommy,” one with “Papi.” She told the deputy she’d been left at home unattended many times. She had not been properly fed since the night before, when she’d had a cut pickle. (The deputy was speaking with her past 11 a.m.) The girl “looked visibly tired and scared,” the deputy reported. The deputy drove her to the Sheriff’s Operations Center in Bunnell, where she was turned over to a behavioral specialist, then to Department of Children and Families personnel.

Around 11:20, a deputy who’d been checking properties and residences in the area spotted Welker walking down CR305–in a downpour–from one of the houses where the deputy had knocked, receiving no answer.




Welker told the deputy that the previous night she’d booked a hotel room to spend time with her ex-boyfriend and her daughter. But her ex wanted to introduce her to a friend of his, Duane Weeks Jr. at a 17-acre property on 305, where they ended up going the night before. They spent the night there. Her ex left at 4 a.m. after an argument. The next day Welker and Weeks spent time together, leaving the house to look at furniture and a Winnebago in a detached garage between 8:30 and 11 a.m. When Welker returned to the house to check on her daughter and get ready to leave, her daughter had vanished.

Deputies estimated the 6 year old was unsupervised between 8:30 and 11: 20, when the girl was spotted by law enforcement. Welker told deputies that Weeks’s residence “was cluttered and in disarray but didn’t feel there was anything within that could pose a hazard to her six-year-old child while unsupervised.” She said the girl typically slept until 11 a.m., and that she had not checked on her before then. She said she was aware of Weeks’s drug history–he has a long history with sheriff’s deputies and the court system, and had recently been sentenced to drug-offender probation after pleading guilty to a felony; he has since been rearrested, on Feb. 13, on a probation violation.

“When questioned why Sarah would leave a hotel with a pool she rented to play with her daughter at a late hour to travel to an unknown male’s residence across the county to ‘look at furniture,'” a deputy reported, Welker replied that “she thought it would be a fun time being on a large property with her daughter and she trusted her ex-boyfriend’s judgment.” She said she trusted her child to seek her out if there was an emergency




As part of her sentence, Welker will have to submit to random urinalyses and respect other restrictions. She will have to complete a parenting class. She has forfeited her parenting rights for now, but after release from prison will have opportunities for supervised contact with her child, with the approval of the Department of Children and Families, which will also determine if Welker may eventually have unsupervised contact. While on probation, full-time work or full-time school will be mandatory.

Child neglect is a third-degree felony with a maximum penalty of five years in prison. If Welker were to violate probation during her four years on probation, she could be sentenced to prison for some or all of that time.