A federal jury returned a guilty verdict Thursday for the first person in the state to stand trial for a death penalty crime.
The jurors deliberated for less than a day and a half in U.S. District Court before finding former Schofield Barracks soldier Naeem Williams guilty of capital murder for the July 16, 2005, child abuse beating death of his 5-year-old daughter, Talia.
They also found Williams guilty of murder for killing his daughter over a seven-month period through assault and torture.
Both charges are death penalty offenses.
The jurors also found Williams guilty of conspiring with his wife, Delilah, to assault and torture his daughter, of destroying evidence and of lying to Army investigators.
The girl’s mother, Tarshia Williams, nodded as each guilty verdict was read in court, looked to the ceiling and bowed her head. She then hugged her friend Ebony Hampton, who traveled with her from Atlanta and who sat with her during the trial.
"I’m happy that justice finally got served," Tarshia Williams said, "My daughter, it’s been nine long years. She can go rest now knowing that her killer is guilty of what he did to her."
Tarshia Williams said she will hold a memorial service in Orangeburg, S.C., where her daughter was born and is buried, and release nine balloons, one for each year the girl waited for justice.
She said a pendant Hampton gave her let her keep her daughter close to her heart during the long wait.
"Every day, all day, while I’m at work, everywhere I go," she said, reaching to touch it, "Even when I sleep, she’s right here with me."
Talia Williams’ picture is on the heart-shaped pendant. There are angel wings on either side. An inscription on the back tells the wearer that Talia will be next to her heart.
Tarshia Williams sat through nearly the entire trial, including during testimony of the months of beatings the girl endured at the hands of her father and stepmother and of the injuries she suffered.
"I felt I had to hear (everything)," she said. "I wanted to know what my daughter endured, what kind of pain she went through. Being that she was alone, by herself, she had to go through all that pain by herself. So that’s why I sat in the courtroom. It was hard but I did it for her."
She sat quietly when her daughter’s stepmother, Delilah Williams, testified that she stomped on the girl, hit her body and face with a belt, slammed her head into a wall, pulled out clumps of her hair when she lifted her off the ground and saw her husband also beat her.
Delilah Williams testified for the prosecution as part of her plea deal with the government in exchange for a 20-year prison sentence.
Tarshia Williams continued to sit quietly when Naeem Williams, 34, testified that he hit his daughter almost every day with a belt or fist, sometimes knocking her unconscious, binding her with duct tape to a bedpost to beat her, shoving her into walls and the floor, depriving her of food, and punishing her when she ate when she was not supposed to and could no longer perform physically exhausting exercises.
On two occasions, however, Tarshia Williams said the testimony was too much and she left the courtroom. One was when a pediatric doctor offered her opinion on the amount of pain a typical 5-year-old child would have felt with the same injuries Talia Williams suffered and when another pediatrician offered his opinion on the physical turmoil her body would have been experiencing from multiple internal injuries.
The case now moves on to the penalty phase.
Tarshia Williams said she will continue to attend the trial but has no sentence preference.
"Whatever they decide, they decide," she said.
THE JURORS who found Naeem Williams guilty of capital murder will return to court Tuesday to decide whether he is eligible and deserves to be put to death. If the jury determines that the death penalty is justified, that will be the sentence. If the jury does not find him eligible to be put to death, the sentence will be life in prison.
Defense lawyer Michael Burt told U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright that testimony from defense witnesses on factors that weigh against Naeem Williams’ getting the death penalty is expected to last just over one week.
That will be followed by government rebuttal witnesses.
The government will not present any new evidence or testimony on why Williams deserves the death penalty, but will instead rely on what was presented during the trial.
Prosecutors had hoped to recall former Honolulu Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kanthi De Alwis to the witness stand to tell the jurors what she said in a pretrial hearing, that Talia Williams’ death was the worst case of child abuse she has ever seen. But Seabright told them that De Alwis’ statement is not relevant to what jurors need to consider.
Defense lawyers had attempted to get Seabright to throw out the death penalty before trial by presenting reports and expert testimony suggesting that Naeem Williams is ineligible because of a disqualifying mental capacity.
Federal law prohibits carrying out the death sentence on a person who is mentally retarded or, as a result of a mental disability, lacks the mental capacity to understand the death penalty and why it is being imposed.
Seabright ruled that the defense lawyers did not prove that Naeem Williams is ineligible due to a diminished mental capacity. However, he is not prohibiting them from presenting the same reports and testimony to the jury during the penalty phase.
Talia WIlLiams was born March 20, 2000, the product of a brief relationship between Naeem and Tarshia Williams. She was born premature, weighing less than 4 pounds.
By then her parents were no longer in a relationship. The girl’s parents never married, but had the same last name.
Tarshia Williams raised her daughter, and Naeem Williams moved away to Tennessee that same year and joined the Army.
When her daughter was 3, Tarshia Williams agreed to let Naeem Williams’ grandmother raise her after the family court in Orangeburg determined that the girl was not thriving in her mother’s care. The girl also had developmental delays and a medical condition that prevented her from knowing if and when she needed to go to the bathroom.
Naeem Williams filed for custody of his daughter, and in December 2004 the family court granted it to him.
The girl arrived in Hawaii to live with her father and stepmother later that month.
Neither Naeem nor Delilah Williams testified that they fully understood the girl’s medical conditions, and Delilah Williams testified that she thought her stepdaughter just wasn’t potty-trained. They said they began hitting the girl to discipline her for soiling herself.
By February 2005 they were dressing her in long pants and long-sleeve shirts to cover up the bruises from the beatings. When a worker at the child care facility on base spotted the injuries and reported them to military police, a doctor at Schofield Barracks dismissed the scabs on the girl’s buttocks as a skin condition and attributed the bruises to her clumsiness because he believed she was mentally retarded.
The following month, Naeem Williams removed his daughter from kindergarten and child care.
By the time the girl died, she was staying at home by herself during the day and prohibited from leaving the second floor of the family’s military quarters at Wheeler Army Airfield to prevent her from getting food and prevent neighbors from seeing that she was unsupervised.
Star-Advertiser reporter Susan Essoyan contributed to this report.
