Melodee Buzzard had a tumultuous short life in the years before she was murdered.
The nine-year-old was found dead by a couple who stopped to take scenic photos in the Utah desert on December 6, months after she took a four-day multi-state road trip with her mother, Ashlee Buzzard, 40.
Melodee had died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head, authorities determined, as they took Ashlee into custody for the young girl’s death on Tuesday.
The mother is now facing charges of first-degree felony murder with an enhancement for using a firearm, which carries an additional sentencing of 25 years to life, according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune.
Authorities have previously said the mother-of-one was uncooperative as investigators started searching for her daughter in October, as Melodee’s family members expressed their concerns over Ashlee’s mental health.
The 40-year-old Ashlee had her own tumultuous childhood, and raised Melodee on her own after the girl’s father, Rubiell ‘Pinoy’ Meza, died in a motorcycle accident just six months after she was born, the Daily Mail previously revealed.
When Ashlee was just nine years old – the same age as Melodee when she went missing – she and her mother, Lori Miranda, became homeless after fleeing Ashlee’s abusive father, according to an article from 1995.
‘He would follow us everywhere. He would smash our [house] windows and harass us,’ Miranda told the Santa Maria Times in the article, entitled ‘Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks.’
The February 1995 article, illustrated with a photo of a nine-year-old Ashlee bearing a strong resemblance to missing Melodee, also saw Miranda cop to past drug use and tell the outlet the pair had been living in a homeless shelter.
Melodee Buzzard, nine, was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds to the head earlier this month
Her body was located just outside of the eastern entrance to Capitol Reef National Park in Utah (pictured)
It described how Miranda fled with her daughter from Orange County to the Central Coast in June 1994 to be farther away from her husband – arriving on the streets of Santa Maria with no job, no home or car and only $40 to support them.
They briefly lived at Good Samaritan Shelter in Santa Maria, but Miranda was eventually able to enroll Ashlee in a school and had found an apartment.
‘I was so scared,’ Ashlee told the paper of her early days in Santa Maria. ‘I knew no one. I felt very uncomfortable.’
Melodee’s paternal relatives told the Los Angeles Times that Ashlee had a contentious relationship with her mother in the aftermath.
By Ashlee’s junior year of high school in 2002, she filed for emancipation from Miranda.
According to the filing, Ashlee was living with her mother and her then-boyfriend when she tried to make the break and was working a job at Pizza Hut.
The petition was eventually turned down due to Ashlee’s failure to fill the form in properly.
Her mother, Ashlee Buzzard, 40, is now facing murder charges and is being held without bail
Ashlee was nine when she and her mother gave an interview to her local paper about their hard life trying avoid her ‘abusive’ father
Melodee was born more than a decade later on February 10, 2016.
In her early years, Meza’s family said they continued to have a relationship with her, with her paternal grandmother, Lily Denes, describing Melodee as a lovable child, who was always smiling and well-behaved.
When Ashlee was in a mental hospital for several weeks in 2021, Denes said another one of her sons took care of the girl – while Denes was working with social services to gain custody of Melodee.
Denes previously told Fox News Digital how she had been ‘so happy’ when social services had called her to take in Melodee, noting that she had gotten a weird feeling about Ashlee from the first time they met.
‘When I met her, my son brought her to the house. She looked so quiet and she was following me with her eyes back and forth,’ she told the outlet.
‘I told my son: “Son, is this girl okay? She doesn’t look like she’s normal. Something’s wrong with this lady.”‘
But before Denes could finish the background check process, Buzzard was discharged from the hospital, picked her daughter up from school and left Santa Maria.
Denes said she had not seen the child since – though, she said, Buzzard would occasionally visit to ask for money.
The grandmother said she believed Ashlee wanted to ‘cut off’ the girl ‘from the entire world.’
Melodee’s paternal grandmother told how Buzzard was once admitted to a mental hospital, during which time the grandmother tried to gain custody of the little girl
After getting her daughter back, Buzzard fled Santa Monica with her daughter, and they bought a house in Lompoc (pictured)
Lizabeth Meza, Melodee’s aunt, also previously told the Daily Mail that Buzzard had lost custody of Melodee in the past because of mental health woes and allegedly admitted psychological issues run in her family.
‘It just saddens me that there was so much going on at that time that we weren’t able to keep in contact with Melodee, and nobody had a relationship with her,’ she said.
‘The system failed her by giving her back to a mother time and time again when she was unstable. There is just so many emotions that go through my mind when I think of that little girl.’
Federal court records show Ashlee filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2017.
She also had five collections and one small claims lawsuit for allegedly unpaid debts filed against her in Santa Barbara County Superior Court, the most recent of which was filed by Capitol One Bank in May, the LA Times reports.
Just a few months later, in August, Ashlee enrolled her daughter in an independent study program at Lompoc Unified School District.
After school officials reported Melodee’s prolonged absence, investigators zeroed-in on a multi-day trip Ashlee and Melodee took, beginning on October 7, when they were caught on surveillance footage wearing wigs as they rented a Chevy Malibu
Sheriff’s deputies have said they believe Buzzard had been homeschooling the girl before that, but the California Department of Education has no record of her submitting the required paperwork to do so.
By October 14, school administrators reported Melodee’s prolonged absence from her independent study program to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office – and investigators soon zeroed in on the family’s multi-state trip one week earlier.
Ashlee and Melodee had left their home on October 7 – the same day they were caught on surveillance footage renting a 2024 Chevrolet Malibu.
Melodee was seen at the time wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and a wig that was darker and straighter than her natural hair, as Ashlee wore a long, curly-haired wig.
The mother and daughter were then spotted two days later on the Colorado side of the Colorado-Utah border, and Santa Barbara County Sheriff-Coroner Bill Brown said ‘detectives now believe that Melodee was murdered shortly after that stop.’
Ashlee returned home without her daughter the following day, and when authorities went to ask her what had happened to her daughter days later, she refused to provide any information about Melodee’s location or condition, sheriff’s officials have said.
Ashlee Buzzard was taken into custody on November 7 afternoon outside her home in Lompoc, when she was accused of unlawfully violating the personal liberty of Tyler S Brewer
Ashlee Buzzard was then arrested on November 7 in an incident unrelated to the investigation into the girl’s disappearance, when she was accused of unlawfully violating the personal liberty of Tyler S Brewer, to whom she disclosed sensitive information.
Brewer, a paralegal and an acquaintance of Buzzard’s, said he visited her at her home to offer assistance in the search for Melodee, and claimed that the situation quickly escalated.
But at a hearing, a Santa Barbara County Superior Court judge dismissed the case after new evidence came to light that called his version of events into question.
Buzzard then remained free until her arrest on Tuesday, when Santa Barbara County Sheriff-Coroner Bill Brown announced that she had been arrested for allegedly murdering her own daughter.
‘This level of criminal activity is particularly shocking, given the calculated, cold-blooded and criminally sophisticated premeditation and heartlessness that went into planning it and the ruthlessness that went into actually committing the crime,’ Brown said at a news conference that night.
He claimed that Buzzard switched the license plates on the 2024 Chevy Malibu she had rented for her and her daughter’s multi-state adventure to ones from New York and even backed the vehicle into gas stations ‘in an apparent attempt to avoid detection by surveillance cameras.’
The FBI then had to call in help from seven different field offices across the Western United States to track the mother and daughter as they traveled through California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado.
Multiple police and sheriff’s offices also helped track their movements, spotting Ashlee and Melodee making several stops wearing different wigs, before Ashlee returned to Santa Barbara and gave the car back.
Authorities arrested Buzzard for allegedly killing her daughter on Tuesday, Santa Barbara County Sheriff-Coroner Bill Brown announced at a news conference
When authorities then learned that the little girl was missing, police and the FBI raided Ashlee’s Lompoc home on October 30 – and uncovered an expended cartridge.
A search of the rented Chevy Malibu uncovered similar ammunition.
Once investigators received the tip that a body had been found in Utah on December 8, they compared cartridge cases recovered from the scene to those found at Ashlee’s Lompoc home and inside the vehicle, and determined that they were ‘linked,’ according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune.
The FBI’s DNA analysis of the body also found a familial DNA match to Ashlee on Monday, authorities said.
It remains unclear what may have motivated Buzzard to kill her own daughter, Brown admitted as he vowed to get justice for the little girl.
‘Today we stand together in grief, but also with resolve,’ the sheriff declared.
‘Melodee deserved a far better life than she had.’
In the meantime, Buzzard is being held without bail.
She is due back in court on Friday for an arraignment,
