As far as we can tell at this point, those men had a right to be at that corner, they weren't breaking any laws. They had a right to have guns in their pockets and they may have been justified in returning fire. |
Certainly he should have been taken to a hospital and he wasn't. Certainly, people do survive severe burns, but they need to get to a burn center. In this case that care was deliberately denied. |
For a week, the grandmother applied powder and ointment to these severe burns, and the boy just got worse and sicker. |
If they'd reported these burns immediately, he would have been taken to a burn center and treated. It's a question for the medical examiner whether he could have been saved. We've certainly seen people survive burns before with proper treatment. |
It looks like he tried to hide from the fire in a back room and that turned out to be a fatal error because the apartment filled with smoke and he was overcome. |
It's just devastating. Everyone's in shock. It's the kind of tragic thing that no family wants to see. |
It's one of the most challenging neighborhoods that we patrol. We're familiar with it. |
She punished him by filling the bathtub with scalding water and submerging him in it. After she inflicted these serious, serious burns on him, she turned him back over to his grandmother. The grandmother took him home on Christmas Day and kept him for a week, allowing him to suffer and gradually die. |
The engineer believed she was trying to get out of the way, but she was a little unsteady and had trouble traversing the tracks. |
The engineer said he saw a woman on the tracks. He sounded his horn. He applied his brakes. Of course he couldn't stop. |
The grandmother decided that on Christmas Day, she would allow the boy to be with his mother. |
The grandmother, Annie Williams, had been charged by us with manslaughter, but the grand jury is returned now with a charge of murder in the first degree. |
This boy had no treatment. He just suffered for a week. |
This is not a place that has cash on hand. It's not a bank. These are just people working in an office environment. |
We don't know, at this point, whether she just hit the road and drove away, or whether she's gone into a canal, or what. |