A woman and her boyfriend are in custody and face serious charges following the death of an eight-year-old boy whose skeletal remains were found Sunday inside a Texas apartment, abused the child for years.
Police reveal boyfriend of mother of child found in apartment abused boy for years
Police said the boy’s remains were found along with his three surviving siblings who appeared to have been abandoned.
The children’s mother, Gloria Williams, and her boyfriend, Brian Coulter, were arrested Tuesday.
Coulter, 31, has been charged with murder, while Williams, 35, was charged with felony injury to a child by omission and tampering with evidence (human corpse), Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez announced Tuesday.
Sheriff Gonzalez said more charges could be filed.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Houston, which performs all autopsies in the county, listed the primary cause of death as “homicidal violence with multiple blunt force injuries.”
One of the surviving siblings, a 15-year-old boy, called the sheriff’s department Sunday and told authorities his brother had been dead for a year, police said.
Officers found the teen and two other siblings, ages 10 and 7, living alone in the apartment, Sheriff Gonzalez said.
The 15-year-old told authorities that his parents had not lived in the apartment for several months.
Gonzalez said it appeared that the surviving children “stood up for each other.”
Their apartment had no electricity and a neighbor had helped the children by charging them a phone and buying them food, according to Deputy Thomas Gilliland, spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
He said investigators were still trying to determine why no one at the apartment complex had noticed anything unusual.
The three surviving children were taken to a hospital for evaluation and treatment.
