A Texas man was cleared of killing his 2-year-old daughter, after his 7-year-old son admitted to causing the death.
Anthony Michael Sanders, 33, was accused of smothering daughter Ellie Mae Sanders to death in their Fort Worth-area home on Dec. 12, 2015. Investigators pinned the crime on him, believing that he held his hand over the girl’s mouth out of anger for interrupting his computer game.
Sanders has denied responsibility for the incident, saying that he found his daughter not breathing after his then 5-year-old son said that the girl wouldn’t wake up.
Prosecutors, however, later learned that the boy told his mother that he hit the girl with the pillow and it was too heavy to remove it from her head, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. NBC-DFW reported that the boy told investigators that he rolled the pillow on the girl’s face while they were playing.
“He was unable to move the pillow,” the Brady disclosure notice on the case states. “He said that the pillow was a rectangle and was heavy. It had something zipped inside which made the pillow heavy.”
The boy didn’t explain the situation to his father because he didn’t want to get in trouble.
According to a notice, there was a statement from the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office which stated that there is “enough of a difference in the strength of a five-year-old to overpower a two-year-old.”
The girl was also found with bruises and two bite marks.
“It’s my understanding that it’s over,” Sanders’ attorney told the paper. “There will be no more charges coming out of it.”
He’s been held in the Tarrant County Jail since April 2016. Prosecutors dismissed a capital murder trial against him in September and he was released from jail, the paper reported.
