The grisly crime came to surface this weekend and has shocked the area.
The boyfriend of the mother of an 8-year-old boy whose skeletal remains were found in a Texas apartment with his three siblings has been charged with the boy's murder, according to local station KHOU. The mother of the children has been hit with other charges in connection to the death, cops say.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said Gloria Williams, 35, is charged with injury to a child by omission and tampering with evidence, a human corpse; failure to provide medical care and failure to provide adequate supervision, authorities said. Her boyfriend, Brian Coulter, 31, is charged with murder. Both could face more charges, Gonzalez added.
Gonzalez said that Coulter is accused of killing the boy in 2020.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston listed the child’s primary cause of death as “homicidal violence with multiple blunt force injuries” on the autopsy, The Guardian reported.
Authorities believe that Coulter beat the boy to death and then he and Williams moved out of the apartment, according to ABC 13.
Coulter and Williams were booked into the Harris County jail without bond pending appearances before a judge, The Guardian reported.
Inside Edition Digital has reached out to the Harris County Criminal Courts for information including plea and attorney for the defendants and has not heard back.
KHOU reported that the surviving siblings, ages 15, 10 and 7, attended Alief ISD schools but the district said they haven't seen them since May 2020 and the district made several attempts to contact their mother and visited the apartment in September 2020 but could not reach the adult.
The three boys are now in foster care, according to Children's Protective Services. CPS said there was no active investigations into those children and their wellbeing at the time the children were found, KHOU reported.
Original reports said that the deceased boy was 9 years old but it has now been clarified that he was 8.
On Sunday cops arrived at the apartment where they found three siblings of the deceased child were living in the apartment after being abandoned, they said.
The tip came to cops in Houston when of the 15-year-old called the Harris County Sheriff's Office on Sunday and told authorities that his brother had been dead for a year and the body was inside the apartment, cops said according to ABC 6. He also told authorities that the adults had not lived in the apartment for several months, police said according to East Idaho News.
“I had never heard of a scenario like this. It really caught me by surprise,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a news conference Sunday. “I have been in this business a long time, and never saw anything like this.”
The sheriff confirmed, “It seems that they were in there while the body was deteriorating.”
The 10 and 7-year-old children appeared malnourished and showed signs of physical injury, the sheriff’s office said. All three children were transported to a hospital for treatment, East Idaho News reported.
