On the afternoon of February 24, 2011, smoke began pouring from a house on Crest Park near Waypark in west Houston. Inside were seven children, the oldest three years old, the youngest sixteen months, locked in so they could not wander out. The woman who was paid to look after them, Jessica Tata, twenty-two, had put a pan of oil on a lit burner and driven to a nearby Target. By the time she came back the house was burning. Elias Castillo, sixteen months, Shomari Dickerson, three, Elizabeth Kojah, twenty months, and Kendyll Stradford, twenty months, died side by side. The other three children were badly burned.
Tata, born in the United States in 1988 but also a Nigerian citizen, ran the day care out of her home. Within about twenty-four hours of the fire, while some parents were identifying their children's bodies and others sat beside burn-unit beds, she boarded a plane to Nigeria. She was charged in her absence, the U.S. Marshals Service put her on its list of most wanted fugitives, and with investigators working in Port Harcourt she was arrested in Nigeria in March 2011 and flown back to Houston, where she stayed in jail.
Prosecutors, led by Steve Baldassano, charged her with felony murder, a killing committed in the course of another felony, here the abandonment of children. The first trial concerned Elias alone. It lasted nearly four weeks. Surveillance footage from the Target showed her in the store, and a former manager testified that she did not seem hurried even after realizing she had left the pan on the stove. Prosecutors told the jury she had repeatedly left children unsupervised and that a disaster had only been a matter of time. Former school administrators testified that as a student she had been violent and had set two fires in a high-school bathroom. Tata did not testify.
Her lawyer, Mike DeGeurin, called experts who blamed a defective kitchen appliance, and character witnesses who said she loved the children and tried to save them. He told jurors she had done what she thought was required by locking the doors so the children could not get out, and had simply never imagined a fire. Baldassano answered that it was not the stove, not the refrigerator and not any parent's fault, but hers alone. On November 13, 2012, the jury convicted her of the felony murder of Elias Castillo.
At the punishment hearing the jury heard from Elias's mother, Keisha Brown, who described a happy baby who always seemed to be smiling, and from Tata's sister. The mothers of Elias and Shomari held hands and wept through the closing arguments. After seven hours of deliberation over two days, on November 20, 2012, the jury sentenced Tata to eighty years and a $10,000 fine. The range had been five years to life, and prosecutors had asked for life. In a victim impact statement one of the mothers, Sparks, told Tata the children had never been her babies, then said she forgave her, crossed the courtroom and hugged Tata's mother. The Houston Chronicle reported that Tata would be eligible for parole in about thirty years.
She still faced three more felony murder counts for Shomari, Elizabeth and Kendyll, three counts of abandoning a child and two of reckless injury to a child over the three who survived, and prosecutors said at sentencing that they intended to try the remaining murder counts. What became of those charges is reported two ways: one account says they were dismissed so that she could begin serving her sentence, with the right to refile kept open; another says she later pleaded guilty in the remaining cases. No release had been reported.