Mother going to prison after son reveals younger brother had been dead in home for months
A Houston mother pleaded guilty to two charges of injury to a child after her three children were found abandoned and living with their dead brother in an apartment for months.
PEOPLE Magazine reported that the charges against Gloria Williams stemmed from her 8-year-old son Kendrick Lee's murder in 2021 at the hands of her boyfriend, Brian Coulter.
Coulter beat Lee to death and in April 2024, was handed a life sentence.
Williams will be sentenced in court on Nov. 11.
A Nov. 2, 2021 report from PEOPLE said Williams’s three children—aged 7, 9, and 15—had been abandoned in the apartment for several months with "skeletal remains... found inside the unit."
At the time, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters that the apartment was in a "horrible condition."
"We saw soiled carpet, no furniture at all," Gonzalez said. "No bedding, no blankets that we could see. We saw roaches and flies and a very bad condition for anyone to live in."
Williams's eldest son called the police to report that his sibling "had been dead for a year and his body was in the room next to his."
Williams and Coulter had left the apartment in March 2021, seven months before her eldest son called the police.
Prosecutors said Williams attempted to conceal her son's death, even sending groceries to the apartment once a month and paying the rent.
After authorities found the three children, they were brought to the hospital as they were "malnourished and showed signs of physical injury."
Harris County Lieutenant Dennis Wilford, in a press conference announcing the charges, called Coulter "manipulative" but said Williams should still take the blame for her child's death.
"I would say they are both an abuser," Wilford said. "He's an abuser physically, and she's an abuser by omission."