A Texas mother has pleaded guilty to charges related to her eight-year-old son’s death and abandoning her three other children in a horrible home with their dead brother’s decomposing body.
Gloria Williams, 38, pleaded guilty last week to two charges of injury to a child in relation to her autistic son Kendrick Lee’s death in 2020.
She was accused of knowing that her boyfriend, Brian Coulter, had been beating her children and failing to intervene.
The mother-of-four was also accused of tampering with evidence as she kept his decomposing body under a blanket in an apartment with her three other sons, Click 2 Houston reports.
Her guilty plea comes just months after Coulter, 34, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the young boy’s death.
Prosecutors have said that Coulter punched and kicked Kendrick to death around Thanksgiving Day 2020, and Williams refused to report him to the police, claiming she was afraid her children would be taken away and she would end up in jail.
Months later, in March 2021, Williams and Coulter moved out of the apartment, but left Kendrick’s body under a blue blanket and Williams’ three surviving sons, then aged 7, 10 and 15, inside a bedroom beside the corpse of their brother.
They did not have beds to sleep on, as roaches climbed everywhere, ABC 13 reports.
Williams and Coulter would then return to the apartment every few weeks to drop off some food for the children, but they later claimed Coulter would also beat them during those visits.
By September or October 2021, the electricity to the apartment was also cut off.
But on October 24, 2021, Williams’ teenage son was able to call 911 to report that his brother had been dead in their apartment for more than a year.
Deputies found the boys the three boys all malnourished, and the 10-year-old with a swollen jaw.
The boys then told investigators how Coulter struck the eight-year-old with closed fists and kicked him in his face, feet, back, testicles and buttocks.
Williams’ 7-year-old son also told deputies Coulter continued kicking Kendrick, who was lying on the floor and not moving, while staring at the younger brother who was in the room.
After Kendrick’s eyes turned black and he stopped blinking, Coulter covered him with a blue blanket, the child told deputies.
When Williams then entered the bedroom to check on her son and saw that he was dead, she began crying and fighting with Coulter, her 15-year-old son said.
He told investigators he believed his mother would call the police on Coulter, but ‘she never did.’ She then moved out of the apartment, leaving her surviving children with their brother’s rotting corpse and without any adult supervision.
William’s 10-year-old son told investigators that when Williams came by the apartment at a later date and lifted the blanket off of Kendrick, she found that ‘his body, feet and teeth had turned into a skeleton,’ and that ‘his hair was off.’ His decomposing corpse was said to have been covered with cockroaches.
The 10-year-old also claimed that Coulter would beat him as well, hitting him on the face, stomach, buttocks and legs, and broke his jaw three weeks ago.
When police arrived at the apartment on Sunday, they found the child with a swollen jaw. At the hospital the following day, the boy said that his mother ‘was aware of the injury but did not seek or obtain medical aid for him,’ the prosecutor said.
Coulter and Williams were ultimately arrested two days later outside a library where sources said they were searching for news articles about the case.
At a press conference announcing the charges against the couple, Lt. Dennis Wilford described Coulter as ‘manipulative’ but said Williams should still take blame for her son’s death.
‘I would say they are both an abuser,’ he claimed. ‘He’s an abuser physically and she’s an abuser by omission.’
But Coulter later pleaded not guilty to capital murder charges, and faced a five-day-long bench trial in April.
Over the course of the week, the surviving boys repeated their claims about what happened, and prosecutors revealed text messages between Coulter and Williams following the boy’s death.
In one, Williams told Coulter that Kendrick had feces on him and wasn’t moving. She went on to say her son ‘looked dead,’ and asked her boyfriend to clean it up, according to ABC 13.
Other text messages showed Coulter told Williams ‘it was in God’s hands’ and ‘not to worry.’
Crime scene photos displayed in court also showed the 10-year-old with a swollen jaw, for which he needed surgery.
Houston judge Kelli Johnson said the case was the ‘most horrific set of facts that I’ve ever had to witness, to listen to and image’ in her career as she sentenced Coulter to life in prison in April.
‘I think about what his kids went through,’ she said before handing down the sentence, according to Click 2 Houston.
‘I think about all three of them and their injuries. I think about how you can look at each and every one of them and hit them in the face. So much so that in the end, one had to have surgery.
‘And I hope they, all three of them remaining will go on and live a very, very healthy, happy life,’ the judge said, noting that she was glad the boys seemed to be in the care of a loving family.
‘Now you will leave this court, but you will not leave my mind,’ she continued telling Coulter.
‘And I hope, sir, when you’re in prison, I hope those same boys that have haunted my mind haunt yours.’
Williams is now set to face her own sentencing hearing on November 11.