A mother who strangled her toddler over toileting issues last month and who then threw the slain child’s body into a ravine has now been arrested in Pittsburgh.
Adriene Williams, 26, has been charged with endangerment, homicide, tampering, and abuse of a corpse in the strangulation death of her 2-year-old daughter Adrionna.
The victim had been reported missing by relatives only 40 minutes before her body was discovered by a dog walker at the bottom of a steep incline in a neighboring county, police say.
The case perplexed the community and immediately raised investigators’ suspicions because the distance was obviously far too great for such a young person to wander.
The suspected baby-killing mother has also earned the ire and disdain of many for posting sorrowful pleas to heaven on Facebook after her missing child was found dead.
"Give me my angel back, please," read one of Williams’ vexing updates, followed by "Mommy loves you, my angel."
A 9-page criminal complaint filed in the case outlines what detectives uncovered leading to the arrest of Adriene Williams this week for killing her toddler over toileting issues just as the accused was going to work.
Cell phone records and surveillance tapes, which revealed Williams didn’t get to her security-guard job as planned because she was instead driving to an adjacent area to dump her murdered daughter’s corpse, are critical in the case against her now.
As well, the medical examiner who performed toxicology tests and a complete autopsy recently ruled that the child had been asphyxiated, as opposed to dying from injuries sustained in a serious fall.
That grim body of evidence pinpoints the time of Baby Adrionna’s killing to be shortly after dawn -- hours before any other family member even realized the child was unaccounted for and reported her as missing.
