For most, the thought of killing one’s own child is unfathomable.
Yet, last Friday Lamora Williams allegedly put her two young sons inside an oven and turned it on.
Two days earlier, a Newton County father was charged with murdering his 15-day-old daughter, who died of blunt force trauma to the head. Last month, a 44-year-old Gwinnett County man was charged with killing his 3-month-old daughter; that baby, too, died of blunt force trauma to the head.
And in July, a 33-year-old mother stabbed and killed four of her five children, as well as her husband in Gwinnett County.
“I believe it’s on the increase from what I’m seeing now,” Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said of the number of cases in which a parent is accused of killing their child.
Between 2012 and 2016, 300 children were homicide victims. According to the GBI, which is charged with performing autopsies on all children who die in Georgia, 124 of them were younger than 5 and were killed by a parent or caregiver. The GBI said numbers for this year were not readily available.
Experts say mental illness is often to blame. But there are other reasons as well such as isolation, revenge or not wanting the child to begin with.
“In human society, filicide — the killing of offspring by parents — is a crime that science and society have struggled to comprehend,” said Harvard University professor Timothy Mariano, who authored a 2014 report after culling through thousands of FBI records.
Mariano, who was at Brown University when he did the research, and his team discovered that 500 children nationwide were killed by a parent each year.
In the most recent Georgia case a 24-year-old mother is charged with murdering her children — Ke'Younte Penn, 2, and Ja'Karter Williams, 1. Authorities say she put them inside an oven and turned it on. Her 3-year-old son, at home at the time, was unharmed and her 6-year-old daughter was somewhere else.
Friends said Williams suffered an undiagnosed mental illness and she was under increasing stress. She became a mother at 18 and the next year her father died. While the children's father helped some, she was still a single mother of four children under the age of 7.
“It’s a violation of the most dearly held belief that a mother loves her child altruistically,” said law professor Michelle Oberman, who has written two books about mothers who kill their children.
“I’m tired of us telling ourselves nice stories about what nice mothers do and what bad mothers do. That doesn’t go far enough to explain why.”
The why is critical, agreed Janet Oliva, a former GBI inspector who trained as a profiler at the FBI Academy.
Especially in deaths like Williams' sons'. "It is so heinous," said Oliva, now president of the International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship.
“Did she have mental illness?” asked Oliva. “Was she having auditory or visual hallucinations? She depersonalized them where they could be objects and should could just burn the trash and take it out? Did she absolutely just hate them?
“I see this as impulsive. You have to wonder if in that moment she’s even thinking.”
On a recording of her call to 911, Williams said a cousin was supposed to be watching the children at her Oakland City West End apartment while she was at work. But police do not believe the children were with another caregiver.
“This is not my fault; I just came home from work,” she told the 911 dispatcher.
Williams had recently quit her job so she could stay home to care for her children.
“We tend to want to see these moms as either mentally ill or just bad,” said Oberman, the Katharine and George Alexander Professor of Law at Santa Clara University. “The piece of it that’s a consistent thread in almost all the cases I’ve seen is there is a good deal of maternal isolation. Parenting isn’t a solo event.”
Oberman said these women love their children even though they killed them.
Isabel Martinez is accused to stabbing to death her husband and their four children — ages 2, 4, 7 and 10. She had asked her 9-year-old daughter, who survived the knife attack, for forgiveness and told her she was going to the sky to meet Jesus, according to the girl's account in a report by the state child welfare agency.
A psychological evaluation was ordered but then withdrawn in July but she has since been given new attorneys. That came after her bizarre behavior following the July 6 stabbings. In court the day after she allegedly killed most of her family, Martinez smiled for the news cameras, flashed two thumbs up and put her hands together as if praying.
“A lot of times, you can see mental illness. You have psychopathy going on where you have a caregiver, usually a mother, who has a psychotic break and temporarily loses touch with reality,” Oliva said. “When using these heinous methods — like putting them in the oven or drowning, holding them under water — you have to look at mental illness.”
But there’s more to it.
Besides mental illness, psychiatrists and criminologists say, the reasons parents’ kill their children fall into four other categories.
One is a parent who doesn't want the child. That was the theory prosecutors used in the murder prosecution of Ross Harris last year, who left his 22-month-old son in a hot car in June 2014.
Another is the parent who is neglectful or abusive — “just cruel and mean,” Oliva said.
Others are parents trying to get revenge against a spouse or partner. Or they might be planning to kill themselves and don’t want the child to grow up without them.
“They think their kids are better off going to heaven,” Oliva said.
Keenan said “the hardest to understand is one who harms a child or kills a child to get revenge.”
One of those high-profile cases was Jerry Jones, who was sentenced to die Gordon County in 2008 for murdering his own baby daughter to get back at his former girlfriend. He also killed his former girlfriend’s parents and sister.
Two of the recent cases in Georgia also involve fathers accused of killing infants.
Christopher Michael McNabb was charged with murdering his daughter, Caliyah.
On Oct. 7, Cortney Bell called Newton County 911 dispatch to report that she had awoken to find her newborn missing. McNabb was captured by television cameras that night pleading for the return of his daughter. But when Caliyah was found the next day, wrapped in a blue cloth and placed underneath a log about a quarter of a mile from her home, he ran. McNabb was arrested soon after and charged with murdering his daughter.
Adriana Hamilton was brought to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite on Sept. 9 with fractured ribs and bleeding on the brain. Her father, Charles Hamilton, had been watching his 3-month-old daughter while her mother was a laundromat. Her father was arrested two weeks later at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport just moments after his flight from the Dominican Republic landed.
“It’s not a crime that is committed by a healthy, well-adjusted person,” Oberman said. “It is a crime is so horrific, we want it be simple.”
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