Jury acquits guardian in death of 3-year-old Fort Worth boy. Foster care suit settled for $6M
A break of about 5 inches was among the fractures of Amari Boone’s skull.
Blood filled the 3-year-old’s head, and his brain swelled. The left side of the organ expanded into the right.
When he was called to the Cook Children’s Medical Center emergency room, Dr. Daniel Hansen, a pediatric neurosurgeon, quickly determined that surgical efforts would be futile.
Dr. Hansen concluded the boy had, “a devastating, non-survivable, life-ending head injury.” Amari, who was 41 inches tall and weighed 39.3 pounds, died two days later, on April 12, 2020.
Fort Worth police detectives began to work to determine in what way Amari came to suffer the injury. They started with Deondrick Foley and Joseph Delancy, boyfriends who were Amari’s kinship guardians. The couple drove the unconscious boy from their Fort Worth apartment to the hospital.
Amari’s parents in October 2018 relinquished custody of the child and his younger brother. After placements with two foster homes and two relatives, the boys went to live with Foley and Delancy. Foley had been Rodney Boone’s boss when Amari’s father worked at a fast food restaurant.
Foley and Delancy had been Amari’s guardians for about two and a half months before he died.
Delancy, the boys’ primary caregiver, told detectives he woke about 7:30 a.m. and found Amari unresponsive on the floor of a bedroom beneath a playpen.
Delancy was accused in an indictment of intentionally or knowingly causing Amari’s death by striking the child with his hand or by striking him with or against a hard object or surface. Dr. Richard Fries, a forensic pathologist at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office, performed an autopsy and determined the cause of the boy’s death was blunt force trauma of the head, and the manner was homicide.
After an eight-day trial in the 371st District Court in Tarrant County, a jury on Wednesday found Delancy not guilty of all counts. He was acquitted of capital murder of a person under 10, felony murder and injury to a child offenses. If he had been convicted on the indictment’s top count, Delancy faced the prospect of life in prison without the possibility of parole, the punishment for capital murder prescribed in a Texas statute when the state has waived the death penalty.
After the acquittal, rare in capital murder cases in Tarrant County, Delancy, who is 34, was released from custody.
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The jury deliberated for about 90 minutes.
Judge Ryan Hill presided at the trial, which at times offered something of a credential competition between expert witnesses. A radiologist whom the state called to testify was educated in part at the University of Cambridge. A radiologist hired by the defense completed a fellowship at Harvard.
The Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office presented “no evidence whatsoever” that Delancy caused Amari’s death, defense attorney James Luster argued.
“Joseph did not do this,” Luster told the jury in his closing argument.
The panel appears to have been persuaded by the arguments of appointed defense attorneys Luster and Pam Boggess that the boy may have been injured by striking a windowsill as he climbed into a playpen, at a daycare center or by Foley.
“Justice for Amari is not sending the wrong man to prison,” Luster told the jury in the defense opening statement.
In direct questioning of the defense radiology expert, Dr. Cynthia Day, Luster suggested that Amari may have suffered a head injury at an Arlington daycare center operated by Yolanda Moore where he spent the day before he was taken to the hospital with skull fractures. The defense called other witnesses who testified that two daycare employees, including a director who worked at the business at the time Amari was enrolled, had assaulted other children there. The director kicked in the head a boy with autism.
The state intended to call Moore, but she defied a subpoena and did not testify.
Prosecutors Charlie Boulware and Sydney Brock had no eyewitness. In interviews with Detectives Brad Parker and Domingo Martinez that stretched more than three hours, Delancy repeatedly said that he did not know the source of Amari’s injuries. A video recording of the interviews was shown to the jury.
“What happened, Joseph? What happened? We need to know what happened. You have to come clean,” Parker said.
Delancy sat in frozen silence at the interview room’s round table.
“Talk to me, Joseph,” Parker said.
“I told you everything that I know,” Delancy said.
“No you haven’t,” Parker fired back.
Later, Detective Martinez told Delancy that an explanation had the power to help Amari, then in grave condition.
Delancy said that Amari appeared to have fallen from a bathroom counter when the defendant stepped away while changing the boy’s clothing, but that he seemed to be fine. In a later interview Delancy said he was not certain on what day the fall occurred.
Three physicians testified for the state that Amari’s skull fractures were inconsistent with a fall from a counter.
Prosecutors suggested the boy was likely killed in a flare of temper.
Delancy was the only person present in the apartment, “big enough, strong enough, angry enough” to injure the boy, Brock told the jury.
Among the trial’s most compelling witnesses was Jalah Lawrence, now the senior director of permanency at Our Community Our Kids, who tearfully recalled realizing how little she knew before his death about what she concluded was Amari’s mistreatment.
Lawrence suggested from the witness stand that she had been misled about injury reports and the length of time Amari had been in the custody of Foley and Delancy.
“Do you feel like the system failed Amari Boone in this case?” Assistant District Attorney Boulware asked.
“Yes,” Lawrence said.
The case resulted in several abuse reporting policy changes.
Sheila Roberson, the Our Community Our Kids caseworker overseeing Amari’s case, was fired. The private contractor on March 1, 2020, took over case management in Tarrant County from Child Protective Services, a state agency.
Before his death, Amari’s court-appointed special advocate, a daycare employee, relatives and neighbors warned Roberson that Amari was experiencing abuse.
Roberson did not properly document the reports and added some of them to the boy’s file after he was brain dead.
After Amari’s death and the systemic problems it revealed, Cook Children’s changed its policy on the reporting of suspected abuse to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, nurse practitioner Donna Wright testified. Hospital employees now initiate a new report if the child is already being monitored by a state agency or contractor.
Amari’s grandmother testified that $6 million was distributed among Ariana George, who is Amari’s mother, Rodney Boone and the parents’ attorneys to resolve a lawsuit filed in Dallas County in the case. ACH Child and Family Services and Covenant Kids Inc. were among the defendants.
Delancy elected not to testify.
Foley last year pleaded guilty to an injury to a child offense and, in a plea agreement with the state, was sentenced to five years of probation. Among the conditions was a requirement that he testify at Delancy’s trial.
“You’re a homosexual, correct?” Boulware asked early in Foley’s time on the stand.
“I am,” Foley said.
The witness described for the jury meeting Delancy on a dating website, the decision to take Amari in and seeing the boy two days before he died, unconscious and with blood in his ear.
Staff writer Shambhavi Rimal contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 12, 2025 at 6:59 PM.
