3 Black Girls Were Murdered In Cass County, Texas. Still No Answers
Zi'Ariel Robinson-Oliver, 9, A'Miyah Hughes, 8, and Te'Mari Robinson-Oliver, 5, were found dead on July 30, 2022 the small town of Douglassville, right outside of Atlanta, Texas.
Zi'Ariel Robinson-Oliver, 9, A'Miyah Hughes, 8, and Te'Mari Robinson-Oliver, 5, were purportedly being babysat the night of July 29, 2022 the small town of Douglassville, right outside of Atlanta, Texas.
Instead of being cared for, they were murdered. No one has been arrested and a family and community continues to wait for justice.
On that fateful night, the girls’ mother 28-year-old Shammaonique Oliver-Wickerson, was at work. That meant that the kids were being watched by a cousin, Paris Propps, and their other siblings.
About 9 p.m., they noticed that the girls had vanished. Law enforcement was contacted. Investigators looked all around the house for hours and began to suspect a nearby pond, which is about 200 feet from the residence, when a girl’s shoe was found by the water.
Law enforcement enlisted the Bowie County dive team, which found the girls’ bodies about 3 a.m. July 30.
Propps, who reportedly never called the police to report the girls missing, has never been named a suspect in the case and the girls’ mother does not suspect him.
Initially, it was believed that the girls' deaths were accidental and that they had drowned. But as the investigation deepened, law enforcement converted it into a homicide probe.
Eight months later, the Cass County DA disclosed that the girls had been strangled. There are still no clear answers as to why the DA sat on the fact that they had concluded that a child murderer was loose in Cass County and they chose not to tell anybody.
Neighbor Josephine Webster told local media one sketchy occurrence that happened that night that continues to haunt her: When she had gotten home that night about 9:30 p.m., a man who had been living in the home with the girls and their mom came up to her.
“I gave him my house phone and he called the mom and told her the girls hadn’t showed up,” Josephine told TV station KSLA.
“He was wet and I noticed that,” she said. “It looked like all the way down, not sweat. It looked like water.”
That key piece of information has yet to yield a definitive suspect, which bothers the community.
“Just something about it just didn’t seem right,” said Aberney Webster Jr., a neighbor.
Josephine remembers telling detectives what could be a key piece of evidence about the man who came to her house.
More than a year after the murders, the victims’ mother spoke about the case, which was still open.
“If there is any information on who took my kids to the woods, and threw them in a pond and did unbearable things that was not called for to any child… ’cause my kids deserved justice,” said Wickerson to Revolt Black News in her first-ever on-camera interview about the case.
Tired of what she perceived as a lack of action by law enforcement, Wickerson lamented that there’s a double standard in the rural county.
“If my kids were a different color, [it would] be a different story,” Wickerson told Revolt Black News. “They would not be lounging around, dragging their feet, taking their time if a blonde white girl or white boy were killed… The person that was watching them could have been my color, they would have been in jail that same night. But since that’s not the case, they don’t really care. Cass County don’t care about Black people, they never have, they never will.”
Please reach out to BlackGirlTragic if you have any other information on this important case.
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