Their Parents Cooked Them Alive
A beautiful and innocent little girl was repeatedly stabbed and put in a hot oven alive. Her body was so badly burned she had to have a closed casket at her funeral. Her family members told us at the time that Williams felt overwhelmed as a single mother of four, and she remained quiet in court today as all 14 disturbing charges were read aloud.
“She’s a great mom, a great person, a great sister. We just don’t know what happened.”
On March 2nd, 2011, Greenville, Mississippi police responded to an emergency call at a first-floor apartment around midnight. Inside, they found the charred remains of three-year-old Tristan Robinson. Although the coroner pronounced the toddler dead at 1:02 a.m., he hadn’t been dead long, with his actual time of death possibly being around 10:00 p.m. Authorities stated that Tristan’s body was still warm when he was removed from the oven and that he had severe burns on his body, as well as head trauma. Tristan’s sister was also found at the residence and was removed from the home by the Department of Human Services.
During the investigation, Tristan’s 24-year-old mother, Terrie Robinson, was charged in his death after she admitted to placing her son in the oven and turning it on. Her bond was set at $5 million by Greenville City Judge Michael Pruitt. Washington County Coroner Methel Johnson said that she had hoped that Tristan had died from head injuries prior to being placed in the oven. Autopsy results a few days later, however, proved otherwise. According to Johnson, “His cause of death was thermal injury as the result of the heat from the stove. We cannot relate if he was conscious or unconscious at the time or not, but the head injury may have indirectly or directly come from him rolling over in the oven.”
Johnson said during her many years as coroner, Tristan’s case was particularly disturbing. “This is a really sad moment for me. I’ve seen a lot of things, but this is one that will stick in my memory for a long, long time.”
On April 11, 2012, Robinson was sentenced to life in prison. During her trial, her twin sister, Sherrie Robinson, told news sources that people should not judge her sister before they know all the facts. She said, “She’s a great parent, a good person. We don’t know what’s wrong. We don’t know what happened. Do not sit there and call her a bad mom because that’s not what she is.”
According to the Investigation Discovery series Deadly Women, as well as a WordPress site that we found, Robinson was finding it hard to find a father figure for Tristan and didn’t have much money, and that she was doing her best to survive on welfare and learning about the difficulties of motherhood. According to the series, Robinson was living with her best friend, Veronica Chilis, and was battling mental illness. After Veronica moved away, Robinson went to church to seek some assistance. A preacher prayed for her and reassured her that God will help her get through the rough times in her life. Robinson’s condition worsened as a result of not getting the proper care that she desperately needed.
The next day, the voices in her head told her that Tristan was the son of Satan who must be defeated, so she put her toddler in the oven to put an end to Satan’s malevolent ways. Horrified by what she had done, she called 911 and tried to tell the police that her boyfriend committed the crime. Consumed by remorse, Robinson agreed to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty.
So, we don’t really know how factual that is, because Investigation Discovery tends to embellish stories, and this is the problem with Investigation Discovery: they will make up details of the story because it’s good television, or they’ll change names. Unfortunately, the information we provided you is all that we could dig up from official news sources and court transcripts.
On November 16, 2015, a Houston toddler died from suffering severe burns after she was put in the oven by one of her two three-year-old siblings. After their mother, 25-year-old Raquel Thompson—who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant—and her boyfriend, 21-year-old Cornell Malone, left them alone in their apartment to go get pizza and then visit Malone’s brother, the couple had left them unattended for two hours.
When Thompson and Malone returned home, they could smell something burning, and the three other kids—the two three-year-olds and a five-year-old—were allegedly crying and pointing to the kitchen. In the kitchen, the oven had tipped over with the oven’s door face down on the floor. Malone uprighted the stove, and the next thing the couple noticed was J’Zyra laying on the floor, burned and deceased. The oven had been turned all the way up. Raquel Thompson tried performing CPR when she arrived home, but it was too late, as her daughter had already succumbed to her burns.
Although not immediately arrested, Thompson and Malone were eventually charged with four counts of endangering a child and were held on a combined $36,000 bond. The three other children who were living in the apartment were taken into CPS custody, with the agency saying it was concerned that the children were often left home alone without adult supervision. The two siblings told investigators with Texas Protective Services that one of them put 19-month-old J’Zyra Thompson in the oven, and the other turned it on, and that they made the oven hot, and that the baby was kicking the oven door while inside.
The even more tragic part: J’Zyra’s grandmother lived in the same apartment complex and could have watched, or at the very least checked up on, her grandchildren had she been notified.
On October 13, 2017, Jameel Penn phoned 24-year-old Lamora Williams, the mother of his two boys: two-year-old Ke’Yaunte and one-year-old Ja’Karter. The two had separated three months prior after years of tension within their relationship, and Penn hadn’t seen his boys in about a month. He normally got to see them every weekend. Penn had stated that the two of them had clicked when they first met in their late teens, but the relationship got a bit rocky after the birth of their first child.
Williams had suffered from mental illness since birth, and after her father was found dead in 2014, things only got worse and worse. Williams’s father was her backbone; he had done everything for her, and when she lost him, she lost the world. Her family described her as a slow learner who had to be pulled out of public schools and subsequently homeschooled. When she was younger, Lamora Williams exhibited disturbing behavior, such as self-harm, harm directed at her siblings, and removing the heads from her dolls. This behavior followed her into her adulthood. She would routinely leave her kids home alone and even attempted to cut her own wrists.
In fact, Williams’s own mother contacted DFCS after the death of her father in order to gain custody of her sons, as they were not being fed properly or cared for. Williams, like many mothers, also suffered with some degree of postpartum depression. Recently, Williams had been going through further hardships and had to leave her job the month prior if she could not find a babysitter for her two youngest, and also her three-year-old, Jameel Jr.
However, on that night in October, things took a grim turn. During Penn’s phone call with Williams, she told the father, “They’re dead.” After asking who was dead, Penn received a video call initiated by Williams. She then began to pan her cell phone camera across the room, revealing a gruesome scene in her apartment: two-year-old Ke’Yaunte and one-year-old Ja’Karter were laying on the kitchen floor in front of a tipped-over stove with both their heads inside of the oven, dead.
Penn then phoned the police, but Williams didn’t stop there. After hanging up with Penn, Williams contacted her friend Nessa Smith and told her that she couldn’t do it anymore and that her boys were dead, to which Smith advised her to contact the police. Williams did call 911, and her biggest concern was not the death of her sons; it was the fear of getting into trouble. More than two minutes and 20 seconds passed before she told the dispatcher where she was located.
The dispatcher tried to call Williams and promised to send help, but Williams repeated herself, saying it wasn’t her fault:
“Ma’am, I can’t even talk. This is so serious. I’m so scared. I don’t want to get locked down ’cause I was at work.”
“Okay, ma’am, I understand that you’re scared. I completely understand. But I need to get some help out there to you now. Can you tell me where you’re located?”
“I understand it, but can you, can you please help me? Like, can you please tell me? Like, I don’t want to get locked up because this is not my fault. I had just came home from work, I just came home from work.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I just came home from work.”
Eventually, emergency services were dispatched to Williams’s Oakland City West End apartment on Howell Place in Atlanta. When police arrived at the scene around 11:30 p.m., Williams advised them that she left her three sons home for 11 hours with a cousin watching them. However, after speaking with Williams’s neighbor, it was believed that they were in fact left home alone. Williams went on to claim that she arrived home at 11:00 p.m. to find both her sons dead. Neighbors also claimed the apartment smelt like death, indicating that their bodies may have been inside for a few days.
The kitchen’s oven was seized and entered into evidence for further forensic analysis, and Williams was arrested and held at the Fulton County Jail, and was put on 24-hour surveillance to monitor her for self-harm or attempts on her life. Three-year-old Jameel Jr. was also found at the scene unharmed, but it was thought that he may have witnessed what happened to his siblings. Williams was charged with six counts of murder, making a false statement, three counts of cruelty to a minor, and concealing a death.
The medical examiner could not determine the exact manner of homicide and cause of death, attributing the deaths to violence of unknown causes. The medical examiner also couldn’t rule out that the boys had been strangled before being placed in the oven, but neither of the boys’ bodies had broken bones or any blunt force trauma. The boys were not burned, but their bodies were damaged by the electrical oven. According to autopsy reports, “These thermal changes appear to be entirely from dry heat and changes from prolonged exposure to that heat. It would require an extensive amount of time for it to get to this degree.”
So where does this case stand now? Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any update in this case at all. Per jail records we were able to obtain from the Fulton County Jail, Lamora is still an inmate in their facility, which means she has yet to be tried and sentenced. It also appears that she’s being held on a $19,500 surety bond, in addition to her other charges from the Atlanta Police Department. Williams has also racked up two additional charges while in jail: battery with substantial physical harm and obstruction of a law enforcement officer. And the last news clipping I read on this said she was set for trial sometime in January of 2019. We are over three years later now. I don’t have much sympathy for this person at all, but this is definitely violating her right to a speedy trial. It seems that’s the way with a lot of these cases.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only case where we see something like this. So in October of 2018, tragedy struck once again in Mississippi. This time in a small rural town called Shaw, when 48-year-old Carolyn Jones stabbed her 20-month-old granddaughter, Royalty Marie Floyd, and placed her in a hot oven while she was still alive.
The Shaw Police Department stated that Jones’s brother came home and made the gruesome discovery, and called the police around 7:00 p.m. on October 15th. According to autopsy reports, Royalty died from sharp stab wounds and inhaling heated air, further confirming that she was still alive when she was placed inside the hot oven. According to police reports, Royalty was burnt beyond recognition.
According to Royalty’s mother, Veronica Jones, she’s still coming to terms with the fact her own mother is allegedly responsible. According to a post she made on Facebook, “Royalty Marie Floyd was the best thing that ever happened to me. She’s my one and only daughter, my first love, the hardest thing that I ever had to go through in my life. My heart has been ripped out of my chest. I’m being told that my mother stabbed my daughter and baked her in the oven, but my mother loved my daughter. She always treated Royalty like royalty, and everybody that knows us knows that. To my daughter Royalty, Mommy will always love you, and you will live on in all of our hearts forever.”
At the time of Royalty’s death, Veronica and her partner, John Floyd, were working and living in Memphis, about a two-hour and 15-minute commute away. Carolyn Jones had offered to watch Royalty so the couple didn’t have to utilize a daycare provider. Authorities said they had no immediate information about the circumstances leading up to Royalty’s death. Police tape surrounded part of the home in the days after Royalty’s body was found, and authorities confirmed that Jones was the only person in the home with Royalty at the time. A stroller, high chair, and a trash barrel of toys, including a scooter, sat near the curb in front of the house, all of which belonged to Royalty. Neighbors have stated that these items had been there at least a week prior to her death.
According to Sheriff Kelvin Williams, who responded to the Jones home, “I’ve been doing law enforcement for 25 or 26 years now. This is one of the most horrible things I’ve seen in doing law enforcement.” Carolyn Jones is currently being held at the Bolivar County Jail on a $500,000 bond. A GoFundMe set by Veronica Jones raised $6,023 to pay for Royalty’s funeral expenses.
Now, this next one did not happen here in the States, but it proves that sometimes these things can happen worldwide as well. In January of 2019, 21-year-old Victoria Zagalakova left her 11-month-old son, Maxim Sagalakov, in the care of her parents, 43-year-old Zhanna Miyagasheva and her husband, 48-year-old Alexander Miyagashev. The grandparents often watched young Maxim in their home in the Kharoy village located in the Khakassia region while their daughter worked.
But one evening, the grandparents began to drink and became annoyed with Maxim’s cries. Rather than comfort the boy, Zhanna suffocated Maxim until he went silent, and Alexander placed his lifeless body into the home’s wood-burning stove, incinerating him. When Victoria returned home, the young mother found Maxim’s remains in the wood stove and immediately contacted authorities. Zhanna and Alexander were arrested and charged with murder.
During their trial, the couple both tried to point the finger at one another. Alexander denied putting his grandson in the stove and told the judge, “Your honor, I did not kill, she killed. She told me I killed our grandson.” Zhanna claimed that she was heavily asleep and the last time she saw Maxim, he was alive and well. However, Alexander had a history of doing things similar to this; it was alleged in court that Alexander had previously burned puppies and a cat alive in the same wood stove.
According to forensic experts, Maxim still had a heartbeat before being placed in the stove, and he had died from 100% burns to his body and exposure to carbon monoxide poisoning. As a penalty for such an act, Alexander was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and Zhanna 9.
On social media, Maxim’s mother Victoria penned an emotional message: “Rest in peace, my beloved son. My dear little son, my pain does not ease even for a minute. How will I cope with it that you are not with me? I can’t hug you. Only your photograph is here with your kind and tender look. I look at your picture and you are smiling to me. I miss you so much, my son. Please come to see me just for one second, come to see me in my dreams. I know that you see everything now because you are flying so high.”
There is one other case that we want to talk about; however, it will be its own episode, and it happens not even 10 minutes from us. So that’s the case of Angela Palmer. It happened in 1984. I was one year old at the time, and I just remember growing up with this idea in my head that I could possibly end up in an oven. It was talked about constantly. Yeah, so many people’s parents around here were like, “Well, if you’re not careful, you’ll end up like that girl in the oven,” and it’s just been treated as such a normal thing now.
There’s not a ton of national coverage on it, but we have quite a bit of information here, and we are putting an episode together. With the microwave cases, it was important that we found every case possible as you all requested, and I feel as if we found every case that was available online. But it really made me upset when we were looking into these oven cases as you guys asked us to do, and there was no mention of Angela Palmer. We are going to try to do this case justice, so that way Angela’s story can be told. I will say, if you’re listening and it’s about the end of March or April, wait to the end of this video. There will be a link to the Angela Palmer case, and you can listen to our full episode on it.
If you appreciate this video, know that we have put a lot of time and effort into it. We put in the amount of time that one would spend at their full-time job every week on one episode, and we do it for free. All I’m asking in return is if you appreciate what we’re doing to please hit that subscribe button. If you’re listening on YouTube, we have a lot of new viewers here, and it would mean a lot to me if you hit that subscribe button to make sure you never miss one of our future episodes.
We also have a very wonderful group of people going that extra step to support us on Patreon, so I’ll put their names up right now. I also want to say welcome to two new patrons, Kristin and Tasha, and also a special shout out to Levi, Melissa, and Holly, our highest tier Patreon supporters. There’s their lovely picture right now. Also, a special shout out to Ken for making a direct contribution to our PayPal account. Pauls and Dolls, Holly’s mask site—if you want high-quality masks, go to Holly’s Etsy link down below. Please mention if you were sent from The Misery Machine, it would mean a lot to us if you let Holly know if you came from one of our episodes. And if you’d like to support us on Patreon or PayPal, our links are down below. Again, everyone that supports us, I very much appreciate it. But until next week, we love you. We love you, bye.
