Mother out on parole beats 5-month-old son to death in Philadelphia home
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA: A mother with a long criminal record is expected to be charged with murder after she admitted to beating her infant child to death at their Philadelphia home this past week.
The gruesome crime came to light after crime scene unit investigators and a medical examiner responded to an apartment on the 1600 block of West Erie Avenue in the city's Tioga neighborhood on Saturday, September 7, according to CBS Philadelphia.
The infant, a five-month-old boy, was found unresponsive just before 9.30 am in his bedroom, which was on the third floor of a shared apartment-style home. Minutes later, he was declared dead.
On examining the body, officials found bruising on the child's face and neck area. When she was questioned, the mother allegedly admitted to investigators that she beat the boy with objects in his room.
Surveillance video from a convenience store across the street showed the mother later being escorted out of the home by Philadelphia police.
Speaking about the chaotic morning, neighbor Russell Turner said, "When I came out there was police in front of my door, police down the street and an ambulance. It’s just a tragedy that it happens in our neighborhood."
Abdul Saleem Aziz, who lived next door to the mother, told Action News that he heard someone screaming on the front porch of the house. "I was upstairs in my room, and I heard her sister screaming, crying outside, 'Oh my God the baby's dead, the baby's dead,'" he said.
He revealed that the sister told him she had been communicating with the mother the previous night, and that she was told by the mother that there was something wrong with the infant.
When the sister came to the apartment the next morning, she found the child unresponsive. "She went upstairs to get the child, and she said when she looked at the baby it was like cold and blue, and she said she just ran out the room screaming," Aziz said.
Another neighbor, Lawrence Seals, said he saw no emotion on the mother's face after her son's death. "She was outside the house, out on a cellphone. She didn’t really have no more cry, no tears in her emotion yet, but it's coming," he said.
Other neighbors grieved for the young boy and decried his death. "That’s sad. He didn’t even live his life yet," Markeema Harrison said. "That’s not fair at all to that baby. I don’t know if the money has anything to do with it, but if she did, she deserves to go to jail."
The mother has a lengthy rap sheet that includes 16 priors and was on parole until 2022 on a previous conviction when she killed her son.
Sources and internal documents obtained by CBS Philadelphia suggest that the Philadelphia District Attorneys' Office has approved a murder charge against the mother, who has not yet been arraigned. Authorities have not released the name of either the mother or the child.