AUGUSTA – A foster parent was arrested Tuesday after an investigation that revealed a 5-year-old girl who died in her care was bound with duct tape and left alone in the basement.

Sally Schofield, 39, of Chelsea was charged with manslaughter and taken to the Kennebec County Jail, where she was released on $500 cash bail. She is expected to appear in Augusta District Court on April 18.

Logan Marr was pronounced dead Jan. 31 at MaineGeneral Medical Center, where she was taken after the Augusta emergency dispatch center received a call about a child who had stopped breathing.

The death initially was classified as suspicious, and an autopsy later determined that the girl died from asphyxiation. The state Medical Examiner’s Office classified the case as a homicide.

Schofield initially told investigators that the girl struck her head after falling off a high chair during a “time out” in the basement, but there was no evidence of a head injury, according to a state police affidavit filed by Detective William Harwood.

The investigators’ suspicions were aroused because of inconsistencies in Schofield’s story and because the girl’s eyes showed signs of hemorrhages consistent with suffocation.

Schofield told investigators that the child got tangled in duct tape during the time out, but it was not until later that she admitted to restraining the child with the duct tape, Harwood wrote.

Tiny hairs and blood specks analyzed from the duct tape led forensic experts to conclude that the tape was wrapped around the child’s mouth.

Schofield changed her story in later interviews to say that she left the child alone in the basement while bound with duct tape, but she said she couldn’t recall whether the tape covered the child’s mouth.

She also said the child never let out a scream. She said that once in the past the child had still managed to let out a muffled scream after somehow covering her own mouth with duct tape.

Logan’s half sister, a toddler, was removed from the home the day Logan died.