Shanieka Ward was eleven, Latricia was nine and Christopher was eight. They were found on Friday, February 4, 2005, lying on the floor in three separate bedrooms of a sparsely furnished apartment on Patton Road in southwest Huntsville. There were no beds in the rooms. The children were fully clothed and, according to police sources, unrestrained. The autopsy found they had died of starvation and dehydration, and that they had been dead for a week to ten days.
Accounts differ on who found them. Police said the children's grandmother called them; relatives had been trying to get into the apartment for weeks and Natashay Ward would not open the door. A later local television report said a utility worker made the discovery while turning the power back on.
She was thirty-three, a single mother, and her name appeared in the first wire reports as Nathshay. She was charged with capital murder that night and held without bail. The next day the police spokesman, Wendell Johnson, said she had told investigators she deliberately starved her children to death. They did appear to be malnourished, he said.
The apartment had no electricity and no running water. The utilities had been cut off on January 12. The management company was preparing to evict the family.
She was not destitute. She was receiving more than five hundred dollars a month from the government and around four hundred more in food stamps. A local television news investigation reported that in the weeks before the deaths she had sent hundreds of dollars to the television evangelist Joyce Meyer and had sponsored a child through the TBN network, and that she had been receiving Bible study pamphlets from the Lincoln Church of Christ in Huntsville. The broadcasters, contacted at the time, could not comment.
Two days before the bodies were found she posted a card to a leasing agent named Ratcliff asking for information about six apartment complexes. She wanted a two-bedroom apartment for one person. The agent recognized her name from the news when the card arrived, and turned it over to see the postmark: February 2.
Four separate sets of people came to that door and did not get in.
Workers from the Alabama Department of Human Resources tried to visit in December and she refused them entry. The children did not come back to school after the winter break, and on January 24 Huntsville city schools sent two social workers to find out why. The blinds were drawn and nobody answered. By then the children had just died or were close to it. The superintendent, Ann Roy Moore, said afterward that there had been no reason to suspect anything was wrong. Relatives came repeatedly. Leetha McCaulley, who had managed the complex until the previous October, remembered the family from before Ward's car broke down, when she used to walk the children to school every day. She was quiet, McCaulley said, and paid her rent on time. It was just her and those kids.
In 2006 she pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, and the court was preparing to seat a jury to decide whether she was competent to stand trial.
On February 7, 2007, sitting between her two lawyers in the Madison County Courthouse, she signed a plea agreement and stood to plead guilty to three counts of reckless murder. Reckless murder in Alabama covers conduct showing an extreme indifference to human life rather than an intent to kill, which is a lesser thing than what she had told the police she had done. The plea took capital murder, and the death penalty, off the table. The district attorney, Rob Broussard, called it a business decision and said he was very satisfied with the result.
A prosecutor told the court that she had prayed for her children while they starved in the dark, and that she had stayed in the apartment with their bodies for at least a week after they died.
Circuit Judge Loyd H. Little Jr. sentenced her to three consecutive life terms. Her age at sentencing is given as thirty-two, which does not fit the thirty-three reported at her arrest two years earlier. Under Alabama parole guidelines she would not be eligible for release for about forty-four years.
It is not a series in the usual sense. It is three children who died slowly, over weeks, in an apartment that a child welfare agency, a school district and their own grandmother had all tried to get into.