Left: Brandee Pierce. Right: Zamar King III (Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office).
After reportedly murdering her 9-year-old son, a 41-year-old woman is now in custody, pending extradition to Michigan. Authorities believe she buried him in a shallow grave before leaving the state with her other son.
The tragic chain of events unravelled on January 6th, when Detroit police received a distress call from a residence located in the 19700 block of Woodingham. This call was initiated by a landlord who had stumbled upon a shallow grave in the backyard.
Wayne County Prosecutor, Kym L. Worthy, disclosed to the press that upon investigation, law enforcement officers were led to the grave site, where a human foot was visibly protruding from the soil.
His hands and feet were also bound, she said.
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Cops identified the boy as 9-year-old Zamar King III. Detectives later determined that his mother, Brandee Katrice Pierce, 41, murdered him on Oct. 24. The medical examiner in Michigan ruled the child’s death as being caused by smothering and compression to the neck, police said. About two weeks after the murder, Pierce fled the Mitten State and moved to Georgia where she was arrested on unrelated charges on Dec. 20.
The Detroit Free Press obtained a police report from the December arrest that said a concerned citizen called police in Brookhaven, an Atlanta suburb, after seeing a 3-year-old boy alone in a car. Cops responded and recovered the boy, who was cold to the touch (temperatures were in the 40s that day) but was otherwise unharmed. Officers noticed there was human feces in the backseat along with a deflated air mattress, the complaint reportedly said. Pierce said she and the boy had been living in the car and she donated plasma to make money. She was arrested for second-degree child cruelty and the boy was placed in foster care.
Pierce bonded out of jail but Georgia authorities arrested her for the murder case on Jan. 10, according to Detroit police. She stands accused of first-degree murder, felony murder, first-degree child abuse, tampering with evidence and concealing the death of an individual. Pierce is at the Cobb County Jail awaiting extradition back to Michigan.
Worthy declined to speculate on a potential motive. The case was stunning, she said.
“I have been a prosecutor for a long time, and I often say that I have seen it all,” she said in a press release. “The horrors of this child abuse case defy that. The alleged actions of the defendant are among the most callous I have seen and hope never to see again.”
