Fort Worth jury finds stressed dad who threw baby into sofa guilty of murder
Alfred Williams’ life was packed with strain.
His cellphone service had been cut because the 21-year-old unemployed cook could not pay the bill. He did not have a car. Williams’ days were spent at an apartment in Fort Worth that at times was filled with the unabating cries of his 4-month-old son.
Williams, a father for the first time, handled most of Azari Williams’ care — the bathing, feeding and changing — while his girlfriend, the infant’s mother, was at work for 12-hour shifts of delivering trays of food at a hospital.
The delicate little boy for stretches happily watched a television screen or slept but, at others, was inconsolable.
Alfred Williams took moments away from the stress in smoke breaks outside the apartment in a breezeway on the second floor or in the bathroom, where cigar flakes collected in an ashtray on the counter. Some days he walked to nearby stores.
Williams prayed for relief, for someone to take Azari off his hands for a minute.
“I didn’t want to hurt my child,” Williams would later sob in an interview with a detective.
On an evening in February 2023, he could not take it anymore. Williams, Azari and the baby’s 11-year-old half brother were in the apartment not far from Hulen Mall.
The infant began to cry. Soon the noise became louder and high-pitched. The sibling, Ronie Williams, would describe listening from a bedroom as the cries stopped.
Alfred Williams had yelled at Azari, who was dressed in a onesie, to shut up, Ronie Williams recalled.
Alfred Williams squeezed the infant, the father would later tell a detective. The squeeze fractured two ribs.
He shook the baby.
Alfred Williams then threw Azari into the arm of a couch, causing the infant to bounce and perhaps hit his head on the wall. About six hours later, the boy was pronounced dead at a hospital.
A pathologist concluded that the baby’s injuries, profound brain bleeding and a spinal column fracture, were consistent with being thrown into a surface such as a couch arm.
A jury in the 213th District Court in Tarrant County on Thursday found Williams guilty of felony murder, the first count on which he was indicted in the case. The panel assessed in its verdict not that Alfred Williams intentionally killed Azari, but that in the process of committing the crime of injury to a child, he committed an act clearly dangerous to human life that caused the boy’s death. The jury also found Alfred Williams guilty of the crime of injury to a child causing serious bodily injury.
The jury, which was instructed to consider a prison term of five to 99 years, or life, on both counts, on Friday assessed punishment at 60 years on the murder count and 45 years on the injury to a child count. Alfred Williams will serve the terms at the same time and become eligible for parole consideration after he serves 30 years.
Assistant District Attorney Steven Elliott told the jury in the state’s guilt-innocence phase closing argument that Alfred Williams had thrown Azari “like he was nothing.”
Elliott prosecuted the case with Charlie Boulware.
Alfred Williams’ defense attorney Miles Brissette won admissions from police officers during cross-examination that the officers departed from Fort Worth Police Department procedure by failing to create a scene diagram or a crime scene log and properly mark evidence before collection.
Brissette, who represented the defendant with Bob Gill, argued that manslaughter, a reckless killing, was the best mental-state match to the evidence. Manslaughter was among the lesser-included offenses that Senior District Judge Everett Young included, over the state’s objection, as options for the jury to consider.
Alfred Williams elected not to testify in both trial phases.
The state’s case included testimony from paramedics who arrived at the apartment after they were summoned via a relative, an emergency medicine physician who believed the infant’s bleeding brain was caused by non-accidental trauma and a detective who listened over two interviews to the father’s changing account of what happened in the hours before Azari died.
Alfred Williams first said his son went limp in the father’s arms.
With Dr. Steven Hemberger, an assistant Tarrant County medical examiner, on the witness stand, prosecutor Boulware guided the jury through six photos of Azari taken during an autopsy. A bailiff handed a box of tissues to a juror in the front row, and she passed the box to the back row. At least four members of the panel blotted tears.
As the autopsy photos were projected on a 120-inch screen, Alfred Williams folded his body in his chair a few feet away. His eyes were focused on the floor.
This story was originally published January 22, 2026 at 2:47 PM.
