Aleah Newell Chicago mother charged w/ first degree murder of two young sons after begging for shelter services to take her two boys in.
A Chicago mother, 20, who had recently spoken about ‘getting her life together,’ has been charged with the first degree murder of her two young sons. The charges follow the mother stabbing her 7 month old son and throwing her 2 year old son from an 11th-floor apartment window in the early morning hours of Thursday.
Aleah Newell is also charged with attempted murder for stabbing her grandfather before jumping from the apartment building on Chicago’s South Side on Thursday, abc7 Chicago reports.
Newell did not appear at Saturday’s bail hearing because she is still recovering at University of Chicago Medical Center, a Chicago police officer testified at the hearing.
Her grandfather, Cardell Walker, is hospitalized in critical condition but was expected to live, prosecutors said.
Chicago police responded to the 7200-block of South Shore Drive at about 1:48 a.m. Thursday after receiving a call about a person injured on the street. Upon arriving they found the 20-year-old woman and her 2-year-old son, Johntavis Newell, laying on the ground. The mother had survived the fall after scaffolding taking the brunt of her fall while her toddler son was declared dead on scene.
But there was more.
South Shore Chicago mother meltdown:
Officers later found 7-month-old Ameer Newell in the bathtub of Newell’s 11th-floor apartment, along with the 70-year-old grandfather, who’d been stabbed.
They say Aleah Newell stabbed her grandfather and Ameer Newell several times before she set the infant in a ‘scalding’ hot bath.
She then threw Johntavis out the window and jumped herself. Despite scaffolding breaking the woman’s fall, Newell suffered several broken bones, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
The seemingly double murder suicide attempt comes days after Newel having told her mother, Zera Newell, that she wanted to get her life together according to prosecutors.
The suspect’s mother had been en route to pick up her grandchildren after her daughter requesting that she pick the boys up, prosecutors continued. But when her mother arrived on New Year´s Day to get the children, Newell was gone.
Early the next morning, prosecutors allege, Newell attacked her family.
During the bond hearing, Cook County assistant state´s attorney James Murphy told the judge that Aleah Newell turned on the hot water in the bathroom and let it run, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Murphy said that while the water was running, the grandfather went to use the bathroom and Newell came up behind him, put him in a chokehold and hit him in the head with the towel bar.
Newell then walked into the kitchen, grabbed a knife and began stabbing her grandfather, Murphy said, leaving blood spatter all over the toilet, sink and vanity.
The grandfather was stabbed more than 10 times in the neck, shoulder, hands and arms until he lost consciousness.
Newell then stabbed 7-month old Ameer 19 times in the head, Murphy alleged. She then picked him up, carried him to the bathroom and plunged him face down into the scalding water in the bathtub, according to Murphy.
But she wasn’t finished.
Newell left Ameer in the bathtub and went to the living room where Johntavis was. She cut a hole in the window screen and threw Johntavis from the apartment, Murphy said.
About 20 seconds later, Newell crawled through the hole and fell to the ground next to her two year old son.
Security video caught the two as they landed on the concrete, Murphy said.
Newell can be seen on the video moving and sitting up after the fall, Murphy said.
The children’s deaths marked the first homicides into the new year for Chicago.
Single parent begging for help:
Zera Newell told the Sun-Times that Aleah Newell took her children to a women’s shelter earlier in the week in Humboldt Park and ‘Shield of Hope’ workers she was unable to take care of her children and asked workers to step in. The homeless center denied the mother’s request.
Newell had stayed at the women’s shelter which is run by the Salvation Army from Monday until Wednesday morning.
Zera Newell said her daughter had shown signs of depression in the past.
‘I thought she was over that,’ Newell said, adding that ‘maybe behind closed doors it was another thing.’
The Salvation Army told WBBM-TV that Aleah Newell stayed Monday and Tuesday at Shield of Hope, a Chicago homeless shelter for families, and left on Wednesday morning.
Adrianne Thomas, a woman at the shelter, told WGNTV that the shelter told Newell that they couldn’t help her.
‘It was wrong for them not to help her,’ she said. ‘She told us that she asked them during intake, [and said], ‘Well I asked them if they could help me, and they said they couldn’t help me. I had to do it on my own.”
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has started an investigation into the deaths. A department spokesman said DCFS had no prior contact with the family.
In May 2017, Newell lost her older brother to suicide. Last summer, her other brother posted a message on Facebook saying his sister was in the hospital and asking for prayers: ‘May god show her the right path and let her not go down the same path as our brother.’
Unclear is the location and identity of the deceased brother’s father(s) and what support the father(s), if any – offered Newell as a presumably single parent trying to raise her two young boys. An issue which continues to be endemic in the African American community….
