Mom who hid dead daughter’s body in Centreville garage sentenced to prison

The mother of a 6-year-old whose body was found decomposing in a Centreville garage two years ago has been sentenced to prison for hiding her daughter’s death.

Elizabeth A. Quate, 37, will be spending the next two and a half years in the Illinois Department of Corrections. Circuit Judge Zina Cruse oversaw the case. A jury found Quate guilty in March.

Quate and her 36-year-old husband, Jason Quate, were charged with concealing a homicidal death after the body of her daughter, Alysha Quate, was found inside a plastic container in 2017. The girl’s grandparents, Christine and Dan O’Dell, said their daughter had told them Alysha died after being struck by her father and then choking on food in March 2014.

“He killed Alysha,” Dan O’Dell told the BND at the time. “She was eating and he hit her, and she choked on food. And she was on the floor convulsing and shaking.”

Police said Alysha died in a home on Lebanon Avenue in Belleville before her body was hidden in Centreville. Jason Quate, her father, admitted to killing her in interviews with police in Las Vegas, where the family was living.

The couple was arrested in Las Vegas in June 2017 on the concealment charges. Jason Quate also was charged with sex trafficking, profiting from prostitution and child pornography in Nevada. Elizabeth Quate was extradited to Belleville on a fugitive warrant.

Elizabeth Quate told a women’s shelter in Las Vegas that her husband had been prostituting her, Las Vegas police said. She then told police where they could find Alysha’s body in Illinois.

When police went to the Quates’ home in Las Vegas, they found a “disturbing scene” of Jason Quate with his two daughters, who both showed signs of physical abuse and one had signs of sexual abuse.

Jason Quate has since been charged with 33 additional counts in Nevada, including sexual assault against a child younger than 14, lewdness with a child younger than 14, committing open or gross lewdness with a child younger than 18 and child abuse and neglect. He was charged with first-degree murder in St. Clair County in October 2018.

Alysha’s body has since been buried at Robinson Cemetery in Pocahontas.

This story was originally published August 27, 2019 at 2:53 PM.