Faces of Evil. Lois Gibson
But it wasn’t Alice who came to pick up the child. It was Connie.
Since Alice Curtis had custody of LaShondra and since she did not object, there was nothing the heartbroken couple could do, legally, to keep the little girl. Alice Curtis never notified Child Protective Services of her decision to allow Connie to take LaShondra back. If she had, CPS caseworkers would have visited the home, made reports as to the condition of the child and evaluated her new home. But they never knew.
Time and time again, I have seen cases where unworthy, uncaring parents demand the return of their children and I don’t believe it has anything to do with love. Some people regard their children as possessions and often don’t rest until that “thing” has been returned to them. Whatever Connie Knight’s motives for yanking LaShondra away from the home she loved and dragging her back to Texas, one thing is certain: from that moment on, LaShondra’s life became a living, bloody hell.
Soon, she disappeared from sight.
Alice Curtis claims she phoned her daughter frequently, asking to speak to LaShondra, and visited the house. Apparently, she was easily manipulated by the former drug addict, who convinced her elderly mother, time and again, that LaShondra was out of the house, staying off and on with a distant relative of her stepfather’s.
When Alice became naggingly persistent, Connie allowed her to speak with LaShondra—briefly—on the phone. “I never got any signals anything was abnormal,” Alice said later.
What the old woman didn’t realize at the time was that she wasn’t speaking to LaShondra at all. Connie had put up one of her other daughters to pretend to be LaShondra whenever her grandmother called.
“I never got alarmed, because I saw the other children and they were fine,” Alice said.
Yes...the other children. What about the other children?
In the June 30, 2002 Houston Chronicle, Dr. Curtis Mooney, president of DePelchin Children’s Center, which provides counseling for children and families in the Houston area, including those suffering abuse, stated that it is not unusual for a parent or parents to pick one child out of a family to use as the family’s “scapegoat,” which means that child will suffer more serious consequences for misbehaving—even being locked up.
“That child becomes the one everything is blamed on...Such a victim can be targeted because he or she is seen as a ‘problem child,’ or perhaps has a more aggressive personality than the other children,” said Mooney.
Whenever Alice called Connie and asked why LaShondra wasn’t there, Connie would always tell her mother that the little girl was uncontrollable and that other relatives had better luck with her, saying, “She has mental problems.”
It’s hard not to judge Alice Curtis. Most of us who have children feel, when months and months have gone by without a sign of a grandchild who was supposed to be living only a couple of blocks away, that we would be hugely concerned, we would do something—especially if we knew that this same child’s mother had had drug addiction problems in the past.
But Alice, whose health was not good, was caring for her own dying mother during those days. Distracted, unwell and manipulated by her daughter, she let herself believe that LaShondra was being taken care of somewhere by someone who loved her.
As I said, the human brain is capable of blocking out things it’s not prepared to handle.
Even so, a mother’s instincts can be a powerful thing. Alice claims that, around the first week of September, 2001, she became almost frantic to find LaShondra. When she insisted on seeing the little girl, Connie told her that she’d put LaShondra into a psychiatric facility. Alice demanded to visit LaShondra and Connie agreed.
But on the day they were supposed to visit the facility, Alice pounded on Connie’s door and found the house completely empty.
The family—Connie Knight, her common-law husband, Raymond Jefferson, Jr. and her children—had fled in the night. No one in the family had heard from them. No one knew where they were. At that point, Alice’s own mother passed away and she didn’t have time to worry about a daughter who tended to pick up and leave whenever things got too hot for her.
Using Jefferson’s employment records, Sgt. Douglas traced the family to Louisiana, where they had been living since LaShondra’s death.
All three of the surviving children, ages four, thirteen and sixteen, who lived in the home with Connie and Raymond, denied ever even having seen LaShondra. When Sgt. Douglas showed a photograph of LaShondra in happier days to the thirteen-year-old, she started to shake—violently—from head to foot, but maintained that she had not seen LaShondra. The children each swore, adamantly, that they did not even have a sister.
Raymond swore he didn’t even know the girl and for several hours, Connie maintained LaShondra was still in Georgia with relatives.
So Sgt. Douglas showed them Jefferson’s employment records, in which he’d claimed LaShondra as a dependent, and witness statements from Houston neighbors that there had been “another child” who was not allowed outdoors. He showed them photographs of the blue fleece blanket and he showed them photographs of the closet from their house in Houston, the one with human feces smeared on the walls and floor.
Finally, Connie cracked. At first, she confessed that she had been responsible for LaShondra’s death and she was arrested. The children became hysterical and refused to speak, not to police, not to social workers, not to counselors, not to anyone. In his calm, reassuring way, Sgt. Douglas left word that, when they were ready to talk, he was ready to listen.
After several weeks, Sgt. Douglas’s patience was rewarded. He was contacted by family members who told him that the girls were finally ready to talk. They admitted that, although both parents had been horribly abusive to their sister, it had been Raymond who had killed her.
Confronted with her children’s truth-telling, Connie changed her story. Although he continued to deny even knowing LaShondra, ultimately, Raymond Jefferson, Jr. was charged with injury to a child, failure to stop her mother from abusing her and denying her proper medical attention. Connie was also charged with injury to a child. They were both jailed in Harris County.
Family members, filled with shame, rage, guilt and grief, buried the tiny girl, giving her, at long last, the funeral that Clarence Douglas and Darcus Shorten had so longed for. The detectives attended the service. On the funeral program, above a smiling and happy picture of a younger LaShondra, were printed the words from the Twenty-third Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil...”
Weeping relatives said a few words about how LaShondra had to die because “God needed another flower in His garden.”
But little “Angel Doe” did not have to die; nobody should ever have to die the way she did.
The rest of the story, when Clarence and Darcus finally pieced it all together, was grim.
Because she’d been ripped from the only home she’d ever really known, where she was loved, and thrown into a house full of strangers thousands of miles away, LaShondra did not behave like the adoring daughter her mother and Raymond thought she should be.
So they threw the little girl in a closet.
And left her there.
She was not permitted to leave the closet to go to the bathroom, but when she soiled herself or used the closet floor, she was terribly, horribly punished. And she was starved by her morbidly obese mother.
The other children were told that LaShondra was “crazy” and to leave her alone, but at night or when her parents were out of the house, the thirteen-year-old daughter would sneak LaShondra out of the closet and feed her or creep past and throw parts of her own meals into the closet—LaShondra’s only food.
Sometimes the girl slipped her brother’s training potty into the closet to help out her sister. On cold nights, she let LaShondra slide in under the covers and sleep with her, but they had to hurry her into