Nine-Year-Old Girl Hangs Herself After ‘Becoming Jealous Of Her Baby Brother’
A nine-year-old girl who committed suicide by hanging herself at her home on Sunday had previously told family members that she “wanted to die.”
Justice Williams was reportedly discovered by her distraught mother hanging from the shower frame in the family’s Bronx, New York home around 8.20 pm on Sunday.
Justice is believed to have hung herself after struggling to adapt to conflicted feelings of jealously and resentment over her new half-sibling.
Her parents, Tamiqua and her husband Ray Torres married in 2011, placed the 9-year-old in therapy last year after she told them she was feeling suicidal.
On the fateful Sunday, Tamiqua, 31, went to check on daughter in the bathroom because she felt that Justice had been in the shower. What she discovered was the chilling sight of her 9-year-old daughter hanging from the metal shower frame by a white cloth strung around her neck.
Friends of the family told the New York Daily News that Justice had been very upset when she found out her mother was pregnant with her new half-brother, and this continued after his birth eight months ago.
When Justice told family members that “she wanted to die” during her mother’s pregnancy, her parents took note and sent her to therapy. Tamiqua also kept a pregnancy blog to write down her concerns about her daughter and her own excitement about impending motherhood.
“We were as happy as happy could be until one day my then 8 year old woke up and decided that she wasn’t exactly thrilled about being a Big Sister. I mean who could blame her, she spent the last 8 years all to herself being spoiled by everyone only having to share while in school.”
By August when her baby son was born, Torres believed Justice had adjusted to the new baby. “Fast forward to August when he arrived and she was happy and reassured that although her world has forever changed she loves him more than she thought she would,” a relieved Torres wrote in her blog.
Neighbors have described seeing an anguished Torres rushing out her Bronx house on Sunday Sunday afternoon with a lifeless Justice in her arms.
“I just saw the mom and the baby. She was frantic,” Michael Millan told reporters.
“All you heard was them talking to each other, saying she was in cardiac arrest,” Millan added.
“She looked panicked. It looked she did all her crying by the time we got here. The officers told us to move, get out the way. Then we stayed inside until a cop knocked on our door.”
Another neighbor Bernadette Diaz, who lives on the floor below the girl’s three-story house on Wallace Avenue in the Morris Park block, told CBS Local of her shock.
“It’s hard to believe that a 9-year-old even has a concept of how to do it. I mean, she must have been going through something very terrible to even think of that.”
Understandably, the immediate family are still too shocked to speak publicly.
But Fenderson, 54, Tamiqua Torres’ father, said Monday. “It’s an unforeseen tragedy. I’m feeling like a block of ice. I’m numb.”
He called his daughter a “fantastic” mother who has “nothing but love” for her kids, adding, “No mother should ever have to bury a child.”
The medical examiner ruled Williams’ death a suicide Monday.
