On Thursday morning, Quatavia Givens, 26, reported her boyfriend’s 4-year-old son, Darnell Gray, missing.
She told police that he’d vanished from his bedroom during the night after she tucked him into sleep on Wednesday, Dearly previously reported.
His disappearance prompted a massive search by police in Jefferson City, Missouri, where the boy called home.
But on Tuesday, police made a heartbreaking discovery. The 4-year-old body was located by the search party when they checked a new area.
Now, Givens is under arrest for the death, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Givens told police in a statement that she hurt the boy and planned to travel to Florida afterward. The 26-year-old told authorities:
“I may have hit him wrong.”
She has been arrested and charged with neglect or abuse of a child resulting in death.
The boy’s father, who was visiting his sick mother in Chicago at the time, said he never thought Givens would hurt his son. Kijuanis Gray told ABC 7:
“I trusted her to watch him. But I wasn’t expecting her to do this to him … That’s my only child that I had, my only child.”
Gray is separated from the child’s mother, who lives in Chicago. She was devastated by the loss of her son, Dearly reported.
An autopsy performed on Darnell by Jefferson City revealed that he died from blunt force and sharp force trauma.
On Tuesday, the day Darnell’s body was discovered, he would have celebrated his fifth birthday. His father said:
“He liked to smile, he liked to be goofy. He loved to run around with me. He loved to play basketball. It’s a lot.”
It’s unclear if Givens had a motive to kill the child.