A Georgia mother will spend the rest of her life in prison after she ‘knowingly and intentionally’ killed her two toddler sons by ‘placing them in an oven and turning it on’.
Lamora Williams has been convicted of 14 charges, including murder, in the October 2017 deaths of her sons Ke-Yaunte Penn, two, and one-year-old Ja’Karter Penn.
Police launched their investigation into Williams, then 24, after she called 911 to report that she had come home from work and found the children dead in her Atlanta apartment, according to an arrest warrant.
She said that she found a stove lying on Ja’Karter’s head and that Ke-Yaunte ‘was laid out on the floor with his brains laid out on the floor’. Police say the boys had suffered horrifying burn marks.
A third boy, aged three at the time, was found in the residence unharmed.
Williams alleged the trio had been with a caregiver at the time of the murders and maintained her innocence in the case, but investigators determined that she had placed the children in the oven the night before she called 911.
A jury on Friday found her guilty of a myriad of counts against her including murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, cruelty to children, concealing the death of another, and giving a false statement.
After her conviction, Williams was quickly sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus an additional 35 years.
Williams ‘knowingly and intentionally’ killed the boys ‘by placing them in an oven and turning it on’ sometime between midnight on October 12, 2017 and 11pm the next day, an arrest warrant obtained by Law & Crime stated.
She then made a frantic call to 911 reporting the boys’ deaths.
‘When I came in, the stove was laying on my son, on my youngest son’s head, and my other son was laid out on the floor with his brains laid out on the floor. I don’t know what to do. I just came home from work,’ she told the dispatcher.
The children’s father Jameel Penn also claimed that Williams video called him after killing the children. He contacted police immediately when he saw his motionless children on the ground and realized something wasn’t right.
‘I just received a call from my child’s mother that my … two of my … two dead babies; my sons are dead in an apartment,’ Penn told the 911 dispatcher. ‘She video called me and I seen it. I really think they are dead.’
In a 2017 interview with WSB-TV he described the scene as being ‘like a real horror movie’.
An autopsy report states the boys’ heads were stuck in a tipped-over oven, but the coroner disagreed with police claims that the pair had been burned alive.
‘These thermal changes appear to be entirely from dry heat and changes from prolonged exposure to heat,’ the coroner wrote in the autopsy. ‘It would require an extensive amount of time to get to this degree.’
But prosecutors stuck with Atlanta Police Department’s versions of the events and, despite Williams maintaining her innocence, a jury ultimately convicted her in both Ke-Yaunte and Ja’Karter’s deaths.
Williams was said to have suffered from a long history of mental illness that was brought on by her father’s passing when she was 19 and being a single mother of four.
Her mother previously told FOX 5 that she believed Williams had ‘snapped’ following her breakup with Penn.
