A Texas man was arrested for allegedly murdering his girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter.
Toron Eugene Williams, 30, was charged with capital murder and was being held on $250,000 bond, reported Fox 4.
The Mesquite Police Department said that it received a call on March 24 saying the girl, London Bakker, was found unresponsive in her bed.
Officers arrived at the home to find that London’s mother had rushed her to the hospital.
Williams was later arrested. London’s mother was not a suspect, police said.
The cause of death has not been revealed as of yet and it wasn’t clear what evidence officers gathered that led to Williams’ arrest.
Toron Eugene Williams, 30, of Mesquite has been arrested for the death of a child and charged with Capital Murder. https://t.co/GQTYwrNUIA
— Mesquite News (@MesquiteTxNews) March 27, 2019
Mother Admits Plotting Girl’s Death
A Pennsylvania mother admitted to plotting the death of her 14-year-old daughter.
Appearing to smirk at times, Sara Packer calmly recounted on March 20 how she watched her boyfriend sexually assault her daughter, 14-year-old Grace Packer, then strangle her in a hot attic outside Philadelphia. She said Grace looked at her as she was being choked to death, and Sara Packer took her hand and told her it was “OK to go.”
“Grace had become, for lack of a better word, a non-entity,” Sara Packer said in a monotone. “She just didn’t exist anymore. I wanted her to go away.”
Sara Packer’s testimony came at a sentencing hearing for Jacob Sullivan, who pleaded guilty to rape, first-degree murder and other offenses in Grace’s death. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Sullivan. The defense is seeking life in prison.
Sara Packer has agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence.
On Wednesday, she told the jury that disciplining her daughter had been a problem—she was a “very difficult child”—and she wanted her dead. She admitted she hated Grace, shared a rape-murder fantasy with Sullivan, and helped hack up her daughter’s body and dispose of it months later.
Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub told the jury that he agreed to a life sentence for Sara Packer in exchange for her confession and guilty plea, because the physical evidence against her was weak, it was Sullivan who raped and killed Grace, and her crimes did not qualify for the death penalty.
But Weintraub made it clear what he thought of Packer.
“Is it fair to say you are an utter and miserable failure at being a worthwhile human being?” he thundered at her.
Relatives testified about the impact of the killing early Wednesday.
“It sickens me to know that Grace was abused, tortured and literally thrown away like she was a piece of trash,” said her cousin, Karie Heisserer, with whom Grace lived for a time in 2015. “Grace is in a better place now, free from evil and pain.”
Prosecutors say Packer, a former county adoptions supervisor, spent years physically and mentally abusing the little girl she fostered and then adopted.
Sara Packer testified that she and Sullivan tried to kill Grace with an overdose of over-the-counter medicine, thinking the pills and the heat of the attic would kill her. She also admitted helping bind her daughter with zip ties and stuffing a ball gag in her mouth.
The couple left her to die.
Grace eventually managed to escape some of her bindings and spit the gag out. But she was unable to make it out of the vacant house before Sullivan and Sara Packer returned overnight—some 12 hours later—and Sullivan strangled her.
Sara Packer and Sullivan stored Grace’s body in cat litter for months, then hacked it up and dumped it in a remote area where hunters found it in October 2016.
The jury was deliberating sentencing Sullivan to death but had still not reached a decision as of March 27, reported NBC 10. If Sullivan is sentenced to death, he will join 142 inmates on the state’s death row, though no one has been executed in Pennsylvania since 1999, noted McCall. Gov. Tom Wolf put an indefinite pause on the death penalty in 2015.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.