Baby Grace has a name…and a face…
November 27, 2007
Baby Grace has a name…and a face…
Before dying, 2 year old Riley Ann Sawyers was beaten with belts, picked up by her hair, thrown across the room and held under water, according to an affidavit from the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office.
Police believe 2 year old Riley Ann Sawyers is “Baby Grace.”
The affidavit says the girl’s mother, Kimberly Dawn Trenor, described to police how her daughter died and was put in a plastic storage box that Trenor and her husband, Royce Zeigler, later dumped into a Galveston waterway.
Trenor told police Zeigler tried to commit suicide the weekend before Thanksgiving, and wrote a note that said, “My wife is innocent of the sins that I committed.”
The body of the then, unidentified toddler was found on October 29. A fisherman found Riley’s body stuffed inside a blue storage container that washed up on an uninhabited island in Galveston’s West Bay.
A medical examiner said the child’s skull was fractured, and a forensic dentist estimated her age at 2 to 3 years.
Police dubbed the child “Baby Grace.” A police artist’s sketch of her was widely circulated in the news media and prompted a call to Galveston police from Riley’s grandmother in Ohio, who had not seen the girl in months.
On Saturday, police arrested Trenor and Zeigler on charges of injuring a child and tampering with physical evidence, the sheriff’s department said. Their bonds were set at $350,000 each.
The affidavit, obtained by CNN, says when police interviewed Trenor on November 23, she “gave a voluntary statement on video with her attorney present in which she describes her involvement, with Royce Zeigler, in the physical abuse, death and disposal of the remains of her daughter, Riley Ann Sawyers.”
Trenor’s statement said on July 24, she and Zeigler both beat the child with leather belts and held her head under water in the bathtub. She said Zeigler picked the girl up by her hair and also threw her across the room, slamming her head into the tile floor.
After her daughter died, Trenor’s statement said, she and Zeigler went to a Wal~Mart that night and bought the Sterilite container, a shovel, concrete mix, and other supplies.
The statement said the box containing the child’s body was hidden in a storage shed for “one to two months.” Then, Trenor said, she and Zeigler carried it to the Galveston Causeway and tossed it in, and she saw it drifting away.
Riley Ann’s father, Robert Sawyers, on Monday tearfully remembered her as a “fun loving girl … with a big imagination.” Riley was “very active, very hyper, but also very well behaved,” Sawyers told reporters in Mentor, Ohio.
She would play “with a water hose … spraying the whole patio soaking wet until she was done with it,” he said, as he sat behind two photographs of his daughter, a toddler with wispy blond curls.
Robert Sawyers’ mother, Sheryl Sawyers, said the family was “devastated” to learn that police believe Riley is dead.
“It’s hard to think that I’ll never see her again,” she said, clutching a red Elmo doll she had planned to give Riley for Christmas.
Maj. Ray Tuttoilmondo of the Galveston County Sheriff’s Department said Monday that authorities are “fairly confident” that the toddler whose body was found on October 29 is Riley Ann Sawyers.
DNA analysis is still in progress to confirm the identification. The results will be available in two to three weeks, Tuttoilmondo said.
Tuttoilmondo said Riley is originally from Mentor, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, and that “she and her mother came down to Texas earlier this year.”
The toddler was last seen in Texas “three or four months ago,” Tuttoilmondo said, although he did not know by whom.
Tuttoilmondo said police did investigate whether Child Protective Services had taken Riley away, something the mother had reportedly alleged. Of that report, Tuttoilmondo said, “What we believe is that is not what happened.”
The affidavit said Trenor admitted that after the body was found, Zeigler had her type up a fake letter from the Ohio Department of Children’s Services saying that Riley was to be taken away.
Trenor left Ohio in late May, after filing an allegation of domestic violence against Robert Sawyers and reaching a joint voluntary agreement that gave her custody of Riley and gave Robert Sawyers visitation rights, the Sawyers’ family lawyer said Monday.
“She disappeared,” Laura DePledge said Monday at the Ohio news conference with the Sawyers.
Sheryl Sawyers said Monday that she saw widely distributed police sketches of “Baby Grace” and contacted Galveston police in November. The girl in the police sketches strongly resembles photos of Riley.
“No, I never did think it would end up like this,” Sheryl Sawyers said Monday, eyes welling. “I guess knowing is better than not knowing.”
The girl’s family in Ohio has been “very helpful” in this case, Tuttoilmondo said, adding that the FBI and a Galveston County police officer visited the family in Ohio on Sunday.
DePledge said Riley was the product of a “teenage pregnancy.” Trenor and Robert Sawyers were together for two years as a result of the pregnancy, DePledge said, during which time they lived with Sheryl Sawyers.
DePledge said Monday that the family, whose grief she described as “simply overwhelming,” wants Riley’s body returned to Ohio for a memorial service. “What Riley needs is to be brought home,” she said. “I think this family needs some closure.”
Tuttoilmondo asked anyone who knew the child or her family to help detectives reconstruct the events of Riley’s short life.
The toddler’s case has touched even hardened police officers, he said. “Any way you look at it, we carry a piece of her with us, and we’ll always carry a little piece of her with us,” he said Monday.
He held up a small, pink and white shoe identical to those the child was wearing when she was found. “That says it all. A little bitty shoe.”
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Thank you CNN NEWS
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I can’t imagine anyone doing this to a child…
I just can’t imagine it…I think there should be an eye for an eye in this case…
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
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Well we all know how Texas deals with these degenerates, Let them fry. There is no repentance for them. Someone should take them out to the desert and put them into some rubber tires, douse them with Gasoline and light em up!
“I just can’t imagine it…I think there should be an eye for an eye in this case…”
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” -Mahatma Ghandi
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I was driving to work this morning and I thought about all the injustices in the world, how are governments have gone out of control and no longer work to better us, the cost of healthcare situation, people being exploited, etc… At one point in the car I just let out a random scream of defiance to the forces which cause such things to happen in this world. Then I thought to myself how every time I give in to my desire to get angry at all the bad things happening in the world that the evil wins.
There are bad things happening all the time but it is within their rights of free will to perform these actions. I think this is an inherent rule of this world because every time someone does something bad they don’t magically self combust nor do paranormal entities punish them for their wrongdoings. We have the right to be wrong. Sometimes respecting that right is the hardest thing to do. Especially in a case like this. Every time we get angry at someone who does something wrong though we are contradicting ourselves. You and I aren’t perfect, and though we’ve probably never drowned children in a tub that doesn’t make us any better people by judging people who do. I don’t know what motivated the people in this story to do the things they did, be it fears, or drug use, etc… All I know is that as long as we let events like this knock us off balance we become more susceptible to more of the same.
Have you ever walked around angry or depressed all the time because of things you couldn’t control in the world? I did so for a large part of my life. It practically started ruining me. My ticket out of this was realizing that you can’t change people and people have the right to do what they want to do. People have free will and are self regulating individuals. Our greatest fears always come from things we can’t control. The desire to make life predictable is where we suffer though. Buddha said all suffering is caused by ignorance. By ignoring the fact that people are fragments of god which have the right to do anything (without as labelling it good/evil) we suffer. We wish the world was perfect when in reality the world is only a reflection of what we make it to be. Thus I think the final responsibility for everyone today is just to better themselves. If everyone were a better person tommorow bad things like this would not happen.