Mother forced children to live with rotting body of brother for more than a year

Police said the home was infested with flies and roaches

Defendant Gloria Williams, charged in connection with the death of her eight-year-old son, whose skeletal remains decomposed for months inside a Houston-area apartment with three surviving but abandoned siblings, and her lawyers, Beth Exley, left, and Neal Davis III, appear for a hearing (© 2024 Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle)

A woman forced her children to live with the rotting body of their dead eight-year-old brother for more than a year in a soiled, roach-infested apartment.

A judge on Tuesday sentenced Gloria Williams, 38, to 50 years in prison.

Her sentence came after she had pleaded guilty in October to two counts of injury to a child for abuse that involved eight-year-old Kendrick Lee, who was beaten to death by her boyfriend, and another child, the newspaper reported.

Police who discovered the boy’s body in October 2021, said it was the most disturbing scene they had worked in their careers and that it “seemed too horrific to be real.”

Lee’s three abandoned brothers had been living alone for months and were thin, malnourished and hungry when authorities found them in an unfurnished Harris County apartment that was infested with flies and roaches and had soiled carpet.

Authorities said the children had waited for Williams to call authorities to report that their brother had been beaten to death by her boyfriend, Brian Coulter. Investigators say the mother never made that call and the oldest surviving sibling, then a 15-year-old, finally overcame his fear and called authorities. The two other siblings were 7 and 10 years old when they were found by authorities.

Defendant Gloria Williams, charged in connection with the death of her eight-year-old son (© 2024 Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle)

Williams was sentenced following a nearly two-day court hearing that focused on the extent of her role in Lee’s death. Her defense attorneys blamed Coulter for most of the abuse. Coulter was sentenced in April to life in prison without parole for Lee’s death. The sheriff’s office had previously said Coulter had consistently hit the younger children and had fatally beaten Lee sometime around Thanksgiving in 2020.

A few months after the fatal beating, Williams and Coulter moved out and went to live at another apartment about 25 minutes away, leaving the three surviving siblings to fend for themselves as their brother's body slowly decomposed, authorities said.

Williams relinquished parental rights over her children after her arrest. The two younger siblings have since been adopted, while the eldest is with a foster family, the newspaper went on to report.