Too often we read and hear about the horrors of parents abusing and harming their own children. They’re so shocking, so sickening, that after every case we even begin to imagine that it couldn’t get any worse.
And yet, it does.
On Friday the 13th of this year, 24-year-old Atlanta resident Lamora Williams made a call to 911.
“I just left my cousin with the– with my kids. She just left my kids in the house when I came back from work, and my kids, two of my kids are dead. What do I … what do I … what do I got to do? They dead.”
One-year-old Ja’Karter Penn and his brother, two-year-old Ke-Yaunte, are both dead. Alive and unharmed is Williams’ oldest son, three-year-old Jameel Jr.
“When I came in, the stove was laying on my son, on my youngest son’s head, and my other son was laid on the floor with his brains laid out on the floor.
“I don’t know what to do.”
Sometime between midnight Thursday and 11 pm Friday, both Ja’Karter and Ke-Yaunte were placed inside an oven and baked.
On the call to 911, Williams sounds upset but is quick to ask the dispatcher for assurance that she won’t be blamed.
“Can you please help me? Like. Can you please tell me, like, I don’t want to get locked up because this is not my fault. I had just came home from work.
“I just came home from work. I just came home from work,” she repeated. Williams continues the call by once again mentioning that her cousin left her kids dead in her house. After being asked to make sure that her kids are indeed dead, EMS tells her that they are en route.
While Williams is making her call to 911, the children’s father, Jameel Penn, whom she had three of her four kids with, was also on his own 911 call.
“I just received a call from child’s mother that two of my youngest kids, my sons, are dead in an apartment,” Penn said, stumbling over his words.
“She video called me and showed me this and I seen it. I really think they are really dead.”
Before calling 911, Williams video chatted Penn where she showed him his children’s bodies lying on the floor.
Police finally arrived at the grisly scene to find the two toddlers covered in burns. No cousin was found at the scene, nor did Williams provide police with a name to go on. After interviewing Williams and neighbors, police didn’t believe Williams left her kids with a caregiver.
They arrested her and charged her with two counts of murder and cruelty to children in the first degree. The cause of death is currently unknown awaiting an autopsy report.
“My daughter is a sick person if she did what I think she did,” said Williams’ mother, Brenda Williams said in an interview. “Mora wasn’t right, she hasn’t been right and what happened three months ago, that the kids’ father left her, I told him something tragic is going to happen. She’s going to do something to those kids, she’s going to do something to herself.”
Williams, according to her family, had been struggling with undiagnosed mental illnesses that had been exacerbated when her father had passed.
“I reported her to DFACS at one point in time once her father died and I did tell DFACS everything because I either wanted them to give me the kids or get the kids out of her possession because at one time I thought she was just going nuts not feeding them.”
With her father dying five years previously, having four kids under the age of 7, the father of her children leaving her, and quitting her job, her friends and family believed it was only a matter of time before she finally snapped.
A vigil was held over the weekend for Ke-Yaunte and Ja’Karter. Penn was seen clinging tightly to his only living son, Jameel Jr.
Earlier this week, Penn talked to V-103 The People’s Station to tell his side of the story. Close by on his lap, chirping away as if nothing was wrong, was Jameel Jr.
Lamora Williams is being held at Fulton County Jail without bond on suicide watch. She is expected to appear in court in a week.