BALTIMORE — A 911 call for an unresponsive baby brought police to a house on South Monastery Avenue in Southwest Baltimore on Saturday morning, and within a matter of minutes, officers had called homicide detectives to the scene.
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Officers discovered two-month-old Zorii Pitts dead inside a bassinet next to her parents’ bed in the basement, and her father’s account of what had happened just didn’t add up.
According to charging documents, 33-year-old Darious Williams told investigators he was caring for the child overnight and had given her a bottle at about two in the morning before putting her back down to sleep.
At 7:30, he claims he awoke and found the baby cold to the touch, and he couldn’t find a heartbeat.
The infant’s mother, though, told a different story of last seeing her child lying in the crib motionless as if asleep at one in the morning, and still lying in the same position more than six hour later.
Police also learned of an open case involving the same child a month earlier after the parents took her to Sinai Hospital for what they claimed was an apparent ear ache and that was reported to social services.
Court records suggest the autopsy held the final piece of the puzzle over Zorii Pitts’ death when the Chief Medical Examiner’s office discovered the infant’s skull had been crushed with resulting injuries so severe that the baby would have died within minutes of the trauma.
Just 48 hours after the infant’s murder, her father, Darius Williams, was placed under arrest.
Williams faces charges of first degree murder and first and second degree abuse.
