The call that arrived at AdventHealth Waterman Hospital in Tavares, Florida, on May 3, 2022, was a harbinger of unspeakable tragedy. It concerned a two-year-old girl in cardiac arrest, rushed in from an RV park in Umatilla, with doctors quickly suspecting abuse. Within hours, despite every effort by the emergency room staff, little Jacquelyn Schwingle was pronounced dead. Her passing left a void in the world and, more immediately, a gaping hole of suspicion around the last person she was with: her mother’s live-in boyfriend, 24-year-old Travis Thompson.

What followed was a meticulous investigation by the Marion County Sheriff’s deputies, one that would peel back the layers of Thompson’s carefully constructed façade, revealing a cold-blooded killer whose version of events dissolved under the weight of horrifying medical evidence.

The details of the child’s final moments were immediately troubling. Jacquelyn’s mother, Kristen, explained that an “unknown incident” had occurred while she was in Thompson’s care. Crucially, the couple did not call emergency medical services (EMS) from their camper. Instead, they loaded the unresponsive child into a vehicle and only pulled over on the side of the road to call 911 as they drove toward the hospital, creating an immediate, glaring question mark over the timeline of events. Neighbors at the RV park, who admitted to seeing the children unsupervised “often,” offered the first ominous hints, describing Thompson and Kristen as “not normal,” governed by a palpable, uneasy feeling of something being “off.”

The Interrogation: A Story That Didn’t Add Up

The police investigation centered almost immediately on Thompson. Brought in for questioning, he presented a narrative that was as devoid of emotion as it was riddled with holes. He described his routine that morning: taking Jacquelyn’s older brother to the bus stop, making coffee with Kristen before she left for work, and taking Jacquelyn down to the lake. The tragedy, he claimed, struck later.

Thompson stated that he had left the two-year-old on the couch to watch cartoons while he used the bathroom for about ten minutes. After about ten minutes, he claimed he heard a “thump.” When he peered out, he saw the little girl “laying on the floor like ‘Hey, you all right?’” She was unresponsive, making a gurgling sound. His reaction, he stated, was to panic, call the mother first, and then attempt CPR. The image he tried to paint was that of a concerned, if slightly overwhelmed, parental figure fighting to save a child from a sudden, unexplained medical crisis.

However, the detectives were already operating with information that contradicted his story. They noted a significant delay—37 minutes elapsed between the supposed “thump” and the successful 911 call. Furthermore, when Thompson claimed he repeatedly tried to dial 911 from the camper, the officers, who had obtained consent to check his phone, revealed a devastating truth: “There was no attempt to call 911 from that camper.” Thompson had lied about the most critical moments, choosing to contact the mother first and delaying vital medical assistance, all while maintaining a disturbingly flat emotional affect.

The detectives also exposed other troubling contradictions. They found a loaded AR pistol next to the bed where Jacquelyn was found, a blatant safety hazard for a two-year-old, which Thompson lamely claimed he had taken out to clean that morning. Even more damning was Thompson’s own history. Pressed on whether he had ever been accused of hurting a child, he admitted to a previous incident in 2019 where he broke a child’s arm, an event he dismissed as an accident where he “sat down” on the child. For the investigators, the pattern was impossible to ignore: “lightning struck twice.”

The Autopsy: A Secret Written in Bone

The true turning point in the investigation came when the detectives began to confront Thompson with the findings of the medical examiner. While he continued to deflect, suggesting that maybe Jacquelyn had a brain aneurysm or a condition like lupus, the investigators pulled out the horrifying truth that Thompson had desperately tried to bury.

They began by describing the child’s injuries as “significant” and inconsistent with his story of a fall from a futon. As the interrogation continued into a second, more focused phase, the detectives dropped the bombshell that explained the little girl’s death and Thompson’s evasive behavior.

“Her spine is broken,” a detective calmly stated.

The full autopsy report, completed in the four months following the incident, revealed a brutality that defied the imagination: Jacquelyn had suffered “traumatic injuries to her torso with a disarticulation… a complete separation through and through break of her lumbar spine.” This was not a bruise or a simple fracture; it was a catastrophic, violent injury that had separated the child’s spine, causing her to bleed internally and die in agonizing pain. As the doctors later explained to police, the pain was so excruciating it was likely why she was rendered unconscious.

This was the terrifying secret Thompson had been protecting. It was an injury so severe that the detectives confirmed it could not have been a pre-existing condition, nor could it have been inflicted by nurses or paramedics during transport, as Thompson frantically tried to suggest in his defensive theories. The injury was fresh, fatal, and undeniably inflicted by an extreme, purposeful act of violence.

The Mechanism of Evil: Rage and Self-Pity

Faced with the undeniable medical truth, Thompson didn’t confess; he doubled down on his victim complex, calling the investigation a “setup” and complaining that “that’s just my luck.” This lack of remorse was a central theme the detectives repeatedly highlighted, contrasting his cool demeanor with the unimaginable suffering of the child. “99% of the people that I talk to at least show some kind of like outward emotions,” one detective observed, while Thompson displayed only “contempt or suspicion.”

The investigation then turned to motive, exposing the explosive, self-centered turmoil in Thompson’s life just before the murder. Text messages between him and Kristen in the days leading up to Jacquelyn’s death revealed a relationship on the brink of collapse, with Thompson desperately begging his girlfriend to stay and her insisting on independence. The detectives theorized that this profound sense of rejection and abandonment—centered on his needs—combined with his established pattern of violent, accidental behavior toward children, had fueled a moment of unbridled rage.

He was accused of using Kristen, a single mother, to support himself and live in her camper, and when she tried to assert herself, his self-pity and anger took over. Thompson was doing everything, from obsessive Google searches to pleading text messages, “all centered around Travis.” When he was confronted with the fact that his actions—his delay in calling 911 and his failure to tell the truth—may have cost the child her life, he could only offer a hollow, belated agreement: “I should have called 911 first. Yeah, I should have.”

“Life in Prison is Too Good for This Kind of Evil”

In the final, chilling moments of the interrogation, the detectives laid out the gravity of the situation: “This is going to be ruled as a homicide,” and later, that the charge of first-degree murder was “eligible for the death penalty.”

Thompson’s response was a stunning display of self-preservation and continued denial. Instead of remorse for the toddler, he fixated on his own fate: “I’m going to die” and “I don’t want to die, dude.” His final answer to the question of how a two-year-old girl ended up dead with a shattered spine was a chilling statement of indifference: “I don’t know,” a response one detective vowed to document as his final word to the jury.

Four months after the initial incident, the full medical examiner’s report confirmed the detectives’ darkest suspicions: Travis Thompson had applied “significant gradual force” to the toddler’s body, bending her backward beyond her natural range of motion until her back broke.

Thompson was arrested and, three years later, in June 2025, he stood trial for the murder of Jacquelyn Schwingle. Without ever admitting responsibility, the 24-year-old man relied on his fabricated narrative, yet the medical evidence was irrefutable. It took the jury only two hours of deliberation to return a verdict of guilty on the charge of first-degree murder.

Travis Thompson was sentenced to life in prison. In a statement reflecting the community’s outrage and the brutal nature of the crime, the state attorney did not mince words: “Life in prison is too good for this kind of evil.” The verdict finally brought a measure of justice for a little girl who wanted only to watch cartoons and have a sippy cup, a little girl whose trusting innocence was betrayed and whose life was ended by a callous, shocking act of violence. The memory of Jacquelyn Schwingle, the little girl with the broken spine, remains a powerful and tragic testament to the darkness that can lurk behind a friendly face.