‘They have to be held accountable.’ Dad says death of Grand Prairie boy was preventable
The last time Joseph King spoke to his son, the 6-year-old was about to start his first baseball practice.
Joseph King III, known to most as Jojo, told his dad over FaceTime how excited he was about baseball. King, who lives in Georgia, told Jojo to watch for the baseball bag, cleats and bat that he sent in the mail, then watched from hundreds of miles away as Jojo ran onto a baseball field in Grand Prairie.
Three days later, Jojo was unconscious in a Dallas hospital ICU. His body was hooked up to machines, and he trembled uncontrollably from seizures.
King got the call about Jojo on Feb. 23, and he and his sister caught the next flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. Less than 24 hours later, Brandon Hale, the boy’s stepfather, sobbed as he explained to doctors and King what happened.
Brandon Hale said he found Jojo in the toy chest, not breathing. Jojo’s mother, Jessica Hale, suggested perhaps Jojo had hit his head and fallen into the chest. King, a homicide detective in metro Atlanta, felt his suspicions grow as he listened.
“After hearing that story, I’m not just in daddy mode,” he said. “I’m in detective mode. Because something is not right here.”
Jojo died four days later. In December, Brandon Hale was charged with injury to a child in relation to Jojo’s death. But King still has questions, which he has tried in frustration to find answers to from Atlanta. His son’s death was preventable, he said, and he needs to know why multiple DFW agencies did not step in despite the warning signs. Brandon Hale pleaded guilty to previously abusing Jojo in March 2019, and King went back and forth with Child Protective Services and Tarrant County courts in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Brandon Hale away from his son.
“I don’t even have time to mourn. I haven’t mourned yet,” King said. “I have to fight for my son. There are other kids in Dallas, in Texas. I don’t want another family to have to go through what we went through.”
Report of abuse
Like many children, Jojo loved superheroes, especially Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk. But arguably his favorite superhero was his dad, based on Jojo’s fascination with his father’s job.
King has been a police officer for 14 years. Jojo had his own little police badge and when King would drop him off at his sister’s house while he worked, he would ask, “Daddy, are you going to get the bad guys?” and ask to go with him.
Despite the distance between them, Jojo and his dad were close. They FaceTimed nearly every day and spent holidays and school breaks together.
King and Jojo’s mother, Jessica, met in college and had Jojo together, but separated soon after. Jessica moved to Grand Prairie and got married in 2019, while King remained in Atlanta.
“I was all for that, but I told her that it was her job to vet who you marry,” he said. “I said it’s very important to make sure who you’re marrying because you have our child down there.”
At school, Jojo was well known as smart and energetic, King said. Every day when he left Florence Hill Elementary School, he walked through the hallway and gave every teacher a hug. While Jojo was comatose in the hospital in February, a janitor was among the school staff who visited him in support. He told King that one day after school as Jojo hugged all the teachers, he saw the janitor in the hall.
“(The janitor) thought Jojo was going to bypass him, but he gave him a hug,” King recalls. “All the kids followed what he did, too.”
Jojo’s teachers were the first to realize he was being abused.
In March 2019, Jojo came to school one day and could not sit down. Teachers noticed he was limping and asked what happened, according to a Grand Prairie police report.
The then-5-year-old said his leg hurt because “he got a whooping with his (step)dad’s belt.” The school nurse noticed multiple bruises lined across Jojo’s thighs and legs.
School officials called Child Protective Services and the Grand Prairie Police Department, according to the police report.
A Grand Prairie detective interviewed Brandon Hale and CPS created a safety plan that included barring Jojo’s stepfather from the home while the investigation was ongoing, King said.
King did not know about what happened until three days later, when Jessica Hale called him. She said she had to tell him something that was not “a big deal” but the school “blew it out of proportion,” according to King.
Jessica Hale said Jojo had gotten in trouble at school and she asked Brandon Hale to discipline Jojo, then she left the house to go to work, according to King. When she told him Brandon Hale beat Jojo, King stopped her.
“I said, ‘If this is as bad as I think it is, I hope they arrest him and go to the fullest extent of the law to punish him,” he said.
He was also angry at Jessica Hale for, in his eyes, condoning the abuse.
Jessica Hale did not respond to a Star-Telegram request for comment and faces no charges in her son’s death. Brandon Hale’s attorney declined a request for comment.
King wanted his child away from the couple immediately. After three days, he was able to get a hold of the CPS officer in charge of his son’s case.
He asked, “When can I come pick up my son?”
The answer was, he couldn’t.
“(The officer) said CPS doesn’t pull kids from the home and that I had to call the courts,” King said.
A CPS supervisor did not respond to requests to comment.
The courts also would not help remove Jojo from the home. On April 5, 2019, King submitted a petition for a protective order against Brandon Hale on behalf of Jojo.
Five days later, an attorney at the Tarrant County Family Courts office told King a judge would not sign off on the protective order because Jojo lived in the same home as Hale, and referred him back to CPS, King said.
“I said, ‘Does my son have to die for you to do something?” King said. “Those are the words I said.”
‘This haunts me at night’
In June 2019, Brandon Hale was indicted on a charge of injury to a child for the abuse flagged by school officials. The CPS investigation ended and Hale was allowed back into the home with Jojo, King said. In October, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 48 months of probation, according to court documents.
Those probation terms included taking family classes, but did not require him to stay away from Jojo.
In 2019, Jojo spent Thanksgiving with King and his family in Atlanta.
When King met the Hales in Jackson, Mississippi, so the couple could take Jojo back to Texas, King knew something was wrong.
“Jojo doesn’t really cry much, but when we met up in Jackson and he started crying. ... I had a huge issue with that,” he said. “And that was a red flag.”
King did not know what to do. He could not legally keep Jojo with him, and if he refused to let him go back to Texas, he could be charged with kidnapping.
“This haunts me at night now because I shouldn’t have let him go back,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be in a predicament where I’m in trouble with the law and with my job, but I shouldn’t have let him go back. If I had not let him go back, he would be here today.”
The Hales told King, doctors and police that Jojo had suffocated inside his toy chest.
Brandon Hale said he found Jojo, not breathing, and called police, according to King. Emergency crews shocked Jojo’s heart and got a faint heartbeat, then rushed him to the hospital.
The detective who had investigated Brandon Hale’s abuse against Jojo in March 2019 began investigating again. He told King that Jojo was wet when EMS found him, and there were wet towels around the bathroom, King said.
Jojo had been drowned, King concluded. An eventual autopsy report supported this belief. And he was sure of who had done it.
Brandon Hale got a lawyer immediately after Jojo was hurt. The Grand Prairie detective obtained a search warrant for the Hales’ cell phones and took the toy chest from the house, King said.
A ‘homicidal event’
Jojo’s brain continued swelling for the four days he was in the hospital and he never regained consciousness. Doctors told the family the damage was irreversible; the 6-year-old was gone.
“Jojo thought he was a superhero,” King said. “I said, ‘It’s time to let him do superhero things.’”
The family decided to donate Jojo’s organs so another child might be saved.
Two days later, Jojo’s body was autopsied. The Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office determined Jojo died from lack of oxygen while being held in a “sealed toy chest,” according to the initial report.
The circumstances of Jojo’s death were declared “suspicious” by the medical examiner, but the manner remained undetermined.
On May 19, the detective called King and told him he was closing the case and he was not going to file any charges, according to King. Since the cause of death was undetermined, “there was nothing else he could do,” King said. CPS had not yet finished the investigation.
According to King, he asked for a new detective, and Detective Allen Frizzell was assigned to the case.
The Grand Prairie Police Department said the first detective was promoted, which caused him to be moved off the case, according to a department spokesman. The department denied a records request for information on Jojo’s case.
Within two weeks, Frizzell made major findings that changed the case. He discovered the toy chest was not air tight, as the medical examiner’s report had said. Air could still go in and out of the container even when closed, meaning that Jojo could not have suffocated. A mannequin similar to Jojo’s height and size could not even fit inside the chest with the lid shut, King said.
The autopsy report was revised based on the new information. According to a second report, which is labeled “corrected,” Jojo had hypoxic encephalopathy — a form of brain damage caused by loss of oxygen or drowning. The medical examiner notes that Jojo was wet when EMS found him and “there was concern for possible homicidal drowning.”
“The original circumstances were suspicious,” the report concluded. “And further investigative information only increases the concern that this was a homicidal event.”
On Dec. 22, Brandon Hale was charged with injury to a child related to Jojo’s death. His next court date has not been scheduled. A spokeswoman with the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office said the office couldn’t answer why Hale has not been charged with murder because the office cannot comment on pending cases.
Quest for accountability
There are various “what ifs” that King says could have prevented his son’s death:
What if Jojo had been removed from the home. What if King had gotten the protective order. What if Brandon Hale’s probation terms had banned him from unsupervised time with Jojo.
King often thinks about what a supervisor with CPS told him a few days after Jojo died. She told him, “We dropped the ball on this one,” he said.
That supervisor did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokeswoman confirmed CPS investigated Jojo’s death, but said the records were confidential.
“Everybody who had their hand in Jojo’s case and didn’t do their jobs, they have to be held accountable,” King said. “A life is gone now. We can’t replace that. But we can make changes when it comes to policies and procedures, in training and awareness on how we handle this stuff.”
This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
