Mother, girlfriend indicted on murder charges in beating death of Fort Worth child
The mother of a 4-year-old boy who died in Fort Worth in March and her girlfriend were indicted on capital murder charges Wednesday.
Reyna Marie Sanchez, 24, and Shannon Gray, 23, are accused of beating Gray’s son, Stetson Blackburn, to death. They were arrested in July.
The two said the boy lied and took too long to dry off after a shower, and they hit him on the head and beat him with a belt, according to arrest warrant affidavits. Stetson died of blunt-force trauma.
He suffered cardiac arrest, acute respiratory failure, a subdural hematoma and a traumatic brain injury, a physician told police. The boy was declared brain dead on March 21, two days after he arrived at Cook Children’s Medical Center.
The night before Stetson stopped breathing inside the family’s mobile home in the 3300 block of Bonaventure Boulevard South, Gray gave her son an “ass-whooping” because he was lying, a detective wrote that Gray said in an interview.
“Shannon said she overdid it,” Detective Adam Perry of the Fort Worth police Crimes Against Children Unit wrote in an affidavit in support of the arrest warrants in the case.
Gray said she spanked Stetson with a belt 35-40 times and hit him in the head with a belt about 20 times the day before he was taken to Cook Children’s, according to the affidavit.
Feeling bad, Gray apologized to the boy and put him in a cold shower.
Sanchez made Stetson raise his hands above his head while he was in the shower and kicked him in the stomach two or three times because he was too slow in drying off, Gray told police.
The Tararnt County Medical Examiner ruled the cause of death as blunt-force injuries with complications.
