Woman charged with murder in son's starvation

Tanya Williams' infant twin boys were losing weight when a nurse visited the family Oct. 28 - one week after their birth - at a West Philadelphia homeless shelter.

"I told her she needed to get them to a pediatrician," Mary Louise Nash, a nurse who made postpartum visits under a Department of Human Services contract, testified before a Municipal Court judge Tuesday during a preliminary hearing that ended with Williams, 32, being held for trial on murder in the starvation death of one twin.

On Dec. 23, the 2-month-olds got medical care - in the emergency room of Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. Quamir Alexander was dehydrated and malnourished. It was too late for his brother Quasir: dead, a skeletal 3.8 pounds - less than he weighed at birth.

"She was their mother, and she had four other kids," Assistant District Attorney Jacqueline Juliano Coelho said angrily. "All she had to do was to give him a bottle."

Coelho hotly debated with defense attorney Gregory J. Pagano as he tried to persuade Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni to order Williams held for trial on involuntary manslaughter in her son's death.

Pagano argued that there was no evidence that Williams intentionally denied sustenance to her twins. He said she was facing a first-degree murder charge because she is poor, homeless, and a single mother struggling to provide for five children.

In testimony during the two-hour hearing, Nash said she was concerned that the twins appeared to be losing weight. Nash said she spoke with Williams in early November, left a phone message Nov. 10, and delivered another message in person Nov. 15, telling a shelter receptionist she needed a follow-up visit with Williams and the twins.

Nash said she got no response from Williams or the shelter staff.

The hearing did not answer the question of how two infants could become dehydrated and starving in a staffed homeless shelter under contract to the city and visited by caseworkers.

Indeed, a day before Quasir's death, a caseworker for Lutheran Children and Family Service, the agency that placed Williams and her six children in the shelter, had closed the Williams case file after visiting the family and concluding the twin boys were "healthy and well."

In January, Lutheran Children and Family Service fired the caseworker and her supervisor after an internal investigation. The five surviving children are now in foster care.

On Tuesday, however, the focus was on Williams, and Pagano argued that it was unfair for the legal burden for Quasir's death to rest solely on a poor, homeless single mother.

Pagano said Williams has no record of drug abuse or other problems often found in cases of child abuse or neglect. He added that even Nash noted that the Williams family's 20-by-20 room at the Travelers Aid Society family shelter at 49th and Market Streets was clean and neat, with infant formula in view and her four older children clean and appropriately dressed.

"She is discharged from the hospital with her own physiological issues and absolutely nothing in instructions . . . trying to care for two low-weight, high-risk children."

Coelho, however, argued that any mother - especially one with four older children - should know infants need to be fed. She said Williams' statement to police that Quasir drank eight ounces of formula at each feeding was impossible given the child's physical state at death.

Coelho noted that Quamir gained more weight in the week he spent at Children's Hospital than he had in eight weeks of his mother's care.

Assistant City Medical Examiner Edwin Lieberman said Quasir, when he died, had no body fat and was dehydrated. He said a total of about one-sixth of an ounce of semi-digested and digested material was in the infant's stomach and bowels.

"He was well below weight, 300 grams less than he [weighed] at birth," Lieberman added.

"There's plenty of blame to go around here, but it starts with her," Coelho said of Williams.

Coelho said afterward that her office was continuing its investigation of Quasir's death, including the possible culpability of caseworkers.