Hiawayi Robinson death: Father who brutally sodomized and killed his 8-year-old daughter jailed for 100 years
MOBILE, ALABAMA: A father was jailed for 100 years for brutally raping and murdering his 8-year-old daughter. The harrowing details of Hiawayi Robinson's murder case from 2014 resurfaced after it was revisited in the most recent episode of Investigation Discovery's 'See No Evil' on Wednesday, June 17. The victim's father, Hiawatha Robinson, was charged with felony murder and first-degree sodomy in relation to his daughter's death, AL reported.
It all started when Hiawayi returned home from school on the afternoon of September 16, 2014, and received a phone call from her dad, telling her to come over to her cousin's place, where he was staying because he wanted to give her $150 for her birthday. Hiawayi told her grandmother, Brenda Populus, she was going to meet her father. Prichard Police Department Sgt. Robert Martin said at the time that they talked to the victim's cousin and she said that he was not home when the 8-year-old came over. After that Hiawayi never returned to her mother and grandmother's place. Her father told her worried grandmother that his daughter had never turned up at the pick-up point.
Populus reported her missing to the police at 10 pm on the same day. Hundreds of people, including residents, law officers, and members of the KlassKids Foundation participated in the search for the missing child. Her half-naked body was eventually found two days later in a pile of trash near to where the defendant worked. Law enforcement agents collected two clear hair beads and some black duct tape from the roadway during their search of the scene for evidence. A shocked community demanded justice and even Hiawatha played the perfect role of a grieving father, appearing on television interviews, asking for his daughter's killer to be caught.
It was only after the police started retracing the victim's movements that they started finding discrepancies in Hiawatha's account of his daughter's disappearance. One of the surveillance camera footage showed the child standing inside Best Future, a convenience store and gas station in a strip mall, talking to a woman in line, and buying Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Agent Deric Taylor of the State Bureau of Investigations said.
"She doesn't look scared," Taylor testified. "She doesn't look nervous. She doesn't look like she's in any type of trouble." Within 15 minutes of Hiawayi leaving the store, Hiawatha called Hiawayi's grandmother. "On three different occasions within about an hour-and-a-half time span, he was calling wanting to know where Hiawayi was," Taylor said.
After a search of the SUV that Hiawatha was driving that day, investigators found a clear hair bead and a piece of black tape that matched the evidence found at the crime scene. Also, in a CCTV footage from his home, Hiawatha was seen holding a pair of pants "in a manner to which he is trying not to get anything on him," Taylor said. The pants were not found during a search of the house.
While describing the victim's body during the trial, as it was found, the detective said that Hiawayi's Hello Kitty T-shirt was pulled up above her navel and her bottoms were partially pulled off the lower part of her body. "The purple shorts as well as the underwear that she was wearing were pulled off the right leg and were just hanging on the left leg basically where the knee is," Taylor said. She was sodomized before being suffocated to death. An anal swab tested positive for seminal fluid, but the swab was contaminated so no DNA match was possible.
Investigators believed that Hiawatha assaulted Hiawayi on multiple occasions and that it was the final assault that killed the 8-year-old. Hiawatha continued to plead his innocence even after he was convicted and was being sentenced. "I won’t apologize for something I didn’t do," he said. After he was ordered to be behind bars for 100 years, he said “That’s alright. I’ll be back.” Last year, Robinson lost an appeal to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, Monsters and Critics reported.