Adrian Langlais: Mom’s Lover Beat Toddler To Death, Indictment Says — But State Could Have Saved Boy

Adrian Langlais was a happy, healthy toddler for most of what turned out to be his heartbreakingly brief time on this Earth. But when his mom, Jessica Langlais, began dating a 22-year-old man named Christian Tyrrell, life suddenly changed for little Adrian. Just one day after his second birthday, the little boy was dead.

That was on March 19 of this year. According to an indictment handed down just two weeks ago, the man who beat Adrian to death was Tyrrell, the young mom’s lover who, according to police accounts, hit Adrian so hard against a hard surface that the boy suffered trauma to his head that looked to doctors as if he fell from a second-story window.

But not only did Jessica (pictured below, center) — who has not been charged in the death of her son — do nothing to stop Tyrrell from harming Adrian, the state of Texas Child Protective Services agency completely botched the case, according to a report released by the state last week.

“It’s complete frustration. There is a dead human being. It could’ve been prevented,” said John Winkler, who, though not related to the boy genetically, was a primary caregiver and effectively a grandpa to Adrian for about the first 21 months that the child was alive.

Winkler’s stepson previously dated Jessica Langlais, but Winkler and his wife Laura Martinez looked after the boy even when that relationship broke up. Jessica was six months pregnant with Adrian when she began seeing Winkler’s stepson.

But when she moved on to a relationship with Tyrrell (pictured above, right, and below left) late last year, everything changed. Winkler says that he and his wife started to notice unsual bruises on the little boy’s body, and when they asked Jessica about them, she banned Winkler and Martinez from seeing Adrian.

Winkler called the Texas Department of Family and Protective Service in December to report what he believed to be abuse of Adrian by Tyrrell. But in Januay, when a CPS investigator showed up, despite previous photographs showing Adrian’s injuries, the caseworker reported “no visible injuries during the investigation,” last week’s report says.

But there were injuries — and they only got worse.

According to police records, Tyrrell put Adrian in a “timeout” on March 17 because the boy refused to swallow his food. Tyrrell then went into a room with Adrian, and from outside the door, Jessica heard her boyfriend yell at the toddler, followed by about 20 minutes of silence.

When Tyrrell emerged with Adrian, the little boy had facial bruises and could not stop his eyes from rolling back into his head.

Over the next day, Adrian vomited twice and could not stand up on his own. He appeared extremely sleepy, opening his eyes only when his mother kissed him goodbye on her way to work the next morning.

Later that day, Tyrrell called 911 to report that Adrian was having difficulty breathing. Before he called for emergency services, police later found, he had run multiple internet searches on his phone for the phrase, “how to tell if someone has went braindead.”

The family of Adrian’s biological father has started an online petition to bring charges against Jessica Langlais, in addition to the capital murder charges that Tyrrell now faces. In a similar case in July, Arizona mom Aminda Giebel was arrested and charged with doing nothing while her husband, her child’s stepfather, beat her two-year-old daughter to death.

The state report on the CPS mishandling of the Adrian Langlais investigation also states that the caseworker — who has since been fired — ignored the photos of the little boy’s injuries and never gave them to police, as well as failing to investigate allegations of drug and alcohol abuse against Jessica Langlais and Christian Tyrrell.

[Images: John Winkler, Fort Worth Police Department]