Part 3
Where’s my sister?’
There was no chance at that point that the children would go back to their mother, who was still struggling to meet requirements for counseling and scheduled visits. Instead, the county placed all four children in foster care.
Ms. Hammonds slept wherever she could for several months — sometimes in hotel rooms, sometimes with friends, and many nights in her car — until she secured a home that could accommodate the children. In December 2019, Ms. Hammonds submitted a petition to the court for their return, but it was rejected.
Though the court’s reasoning is not known, the Children Services agency had reported to the court that Ms. Hammonds had failed to meet all of the children’s needs and had not made sure they attended all necessary counseling appointments, according to Ms. Martin, the mother’s lawyer, who said the conditions imposed were unreasonable.
The girls, meanwhile, were placed in group homes. Ja’Niah recalled that, not long after their grandmother dropped them off, she and Ma’Khia were told they had to go into separate rooms for physical examinations. When she emerged, her sister was no longer there.
“I said, ‘Where’s my sister?’” she said. “It was like, ‘We don’t know, we’ll check,’ but he never got back. So that’s when I realized we were being split up.”
After that, Ja’Niah said, the two sisters moved through half a dozen living situations. There was, she said, a foster home so strict that Ma’Khia was often not allowed to leave the house; a group home with dog feces on the floor; a foster mother who screamed at the top of her lungs, not realizing Ma’Khia was recording it all on her phone.
Even when the living situation was good, and a foster parent in Dayton mused about adopting Ma’Khia, her sister was not interested, Ja’Niah said. “She wanted to get back to me, to family. To Columbus,” she said.
At school, Ma’Khia kept her family issues to herself. Jessica Oakley, the teacher’s aide who worked with her at Canal Winchester High School, recalled her as “a hard worker, a sweet girl, very shy.” At the end of ninth grade, she made the school’s honor roll.
She was diligent about schoolwork, and continued to seek out Ms. Oakley’s assistance even when the school shut down because of the coronavirus, once spending eight hours with her teacher on a Google Hangout, going through all her homework.
“She was definitely my girl,” Ms. Oakley said.
She said it was rare for Ma’Khia to mention anything about her family — except for Ja’Niah.
“She was very protective of her sister,” she said. “She was like, ‘No one messes with my baby sister.’”
Micheale Cates, 54, one of the foster parents who briefly housed Ma’Khia during that period, was friends with Ms. Moore, who took her in later. She would not discuss the details of the case, but she said she had noticed a pattern: Children who had escaped from traumatic family situations often long to return to them.
“Home is more than just a location, it’s where you have a level of comfort,” she said.
“Ma’Khia really was a family person, she needed that,” she said. “But, see, sometimes it’s not the best for the children. These children get triggered. I know the whole idea — keep them together, keep them together — sometimes that’s the worst thing for these kids.”
An afternoon at Angie’s
The two girls ended up at Ms. Moore’s house on Legion Lane — not far from their grandmother’s house, and together for the first time since they left her care.
The suburban home is neat and well-tended, with bunches of artificial yellow flowers poking out of the turf beside the door. The two sisters would make TikTok videos, dance, go skating, or go to an amusement center called Scene75 that has rides and video games, Ms. Moore said. Ma’Khia, she said, was not troublesome.
“She’s a quiet girl. She doesn’t start fights anywhere. She wasn’t a troubled child,” she said. “She was fun. She loved her family. She loved her siblings. They were close.”
Still, Ms. Moore placed repeated calls to 911 in which she seemed to struggle to manage the children she had taken in.
Sometimes, she was calling to report that a teenager had “gone AWOL,” failing to return home by curfew. But late last year, Ms. Moore sounded deeply shaken as she asked the police to remove a 10-year-old boy — or, as she put it, “one of my irate foster youths” — from her home.
The boy could be heard in the background, alternately roaring and howling, as Ms. Moore told the police that he had been knocking ornaments off her Christmas tree. Three hours later, she made a repeat call for assistance, saying she did not feel safe driving the 10-year-old in for a psychiatric evaluation.
After a brief initial interview, Ms. Moore declined to answer questions about conditions inside the home in the period before the shooting.
Ms. Cates, who formerly cared for Ma’Khia, said Ms. Moore faced a problem common to many foster parents: The agency expected her to work full-time outside the home, a situation that forced her to leave foster children unsupervised.
“I believe she was a loving, caring foster parent,” she said. But, she added, “foster parenting is a full-time job.”
By this spring, Ja’Niah said, Ms. Moore’s home had become increasingly tense. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, she said, Ms. Moore had accused the girls of stealing the cards that carry cash benefits for food.
And she said Ms. Moore sometimes left them unsupervised, or with former foster children, women in their 20s who, she said, berated them and mocked Ma’Khia’s speech impediment.
After school on April 20, the two Bryant girls found themselves alone in the house with Tionna Bonner, 22, one of Ms. Moore’s former foster children and, Ja’Niah said, her special favorite.
Ms. Bonner, who had come to celebrate Ms. Moore’s birthday the previous day, was now scolding the girls, saying they were habitually disrespecting Ms. Moore.
“She’s like, ‘My mom told you all to clean up this house, it’s dirty,’” Ja’Niah said.
The dispute escalated quickly, but when Ja’Niah called Ms. Moore, who was at work, she said she was too busy to get involved, Ja’Niah said. So each of them called for backup: Ja’Niah called her grandmother, and Ms. Bonner called another young woman, Shai-Onta Craig-Watkins, 20, who had lived in the house as a foster child. Neither Ms. Bonner nor Ms. Craig-Watkins agreed to be interviewed for this article.
Ms. Hammonds rushed over and described standing on the stairway inside, trying to protect her granddaughters as the older women threatened to beat them up. Ms. Bonner had pulled out a knife, Ja’Niah and her grandmother said, and Ma’Khia had grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen. Ja’Niah went into her room and called 911. In the call, placed at 4:32 p.m., Ja’Niah asked for help as people shouted in the background.
Someone could be heard saying, “I’m not scared of no knife.”
“It’s 3171 Legion Lane,” Ja’Niah told the dispatcher. “We got Angie’s grown girls trying to fight us, trying to stab us, trying to put her hands on our grandma. Get here now!”
Twelve minutes later, the police arrived.
In a brief lull, Ms. Craig-Watkins left the house and the sisters began to pack up their things, thinking the worst of the situation was over. As they rushed out of the house, their father was pulling in to come to their aid. But also arriving was Ms. Craig-Watkins, who had returned with two more people. The two groups crossed paths, and Ms. Craig-Watkins spit toward the family, Ja’Niah and Ms. Hammonds said.
“I feel like that really made Ma’Khia really mad when she spit,” Ja’Niah said. “That’s when everything just went left.”
A police officer stepped out of his car and walked toward the driveway just as Ma’Khia turned her attention to Ms. Craig-Watkins and could be heard on a video from a neighbor’s surveillance camera threatening to stab her.
As Ma’Khia charged, Ms. Craig-Watkins tumbled to the ground, and Ma’Khia’s father tried to kick her. Ma’Khia turned to Ms. Bonner and backed her up against a car.
Ma’Khia raised a knife, and Officer Nicholas Reardon, a white 23-year-old who was the first officer to approach the scene, shot four times at Ma’Khia, who slumped down.
As Ma’Khia’s body lay on the ground, police officers led Ja’Niah inside Ms. Moore’s house, along with her father’s young son.
Ja’Niah turned on the television to find some cartoons for her younger brother to watch. Instead, what flashed on the screen first was a news report: a jury in Minneapolis had found Mr. Chauvin guilty of murdering Mr. Floyd.
Before an officer took her phone, she sneaked into a bathroom and made one more call for help.
“I called my real mom — my biological mom — and I told her, I said, ‘I need you. They just shot Ma’Khia. Get here now,’” Ja’Niah recalled. “I needed her.”
All from
Ma’Khia Bryant’s Journey Through Foster Care Ended With an Officer’s Bullet
nypost.com
Smdh.
