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An autopsy reveals that pregnant restaurant manager Danielle Watson was stabbed more than a dozen times before her death in January.
Watson, 25, was closing the Flying Biscuit Café on Rea Road in Charlotte on the night of Jan. 13 when she was attacked by a co-worker as he tried to rob the restaurant, police said. Mark Cox, a 22-year-old convicted felon, was charged with Watson’s murder and that of her unborn child.
In the autopsy released this week, a medical examiner details 14 cuts and stab wounds on her neck, chest, abdomen and hands. Two such wounds – one on her neck and one on her chest – were described as having the “potential to be rapidly lethal.”
The medical examiner also noted a black apron that was found about her head. “The apron tie strings have been wrapped around the head, passed across the mouth in a gag fashion and are tied on the left side of the face,” the examiner wrote.
The autopsy found Watson’s cause of death to be stab wounds to the neck and chest.
According to a search warrant, Cox told his sister that he’d killed Watson, then left his bloody clothes and a butcher knife in his sister's apartment before fleeing.
In May, prosecutors announced they plan to seek the death penalty against Cox.
Watson, a Butler High School grad, was engaged and had learned only weeks before her death that she was pregnant.
Her autopsy confirmed she was seven to eight weeks pregnant.
