Foster Mom Crushes Boy’s Neck Because He Wanted Food

Foster Mom Crushes Boy’s Neck Because He Wanted Food

Darnell Quinzel Taylor was born on January 18th, 2019, in Columbus, Ohio, to parents Leticia Taylor and Quinzel King. Darnell had black hair and sparkling brown eyes. He was loving, funny, and very adorable. He had a big smile and an infectious laugh that fit his mischievous personality. At 5 years old, he liked playing tricks, being outside, running around, riding his Spider-Man motorcycle, and playing with his brother, sister, and cousins. His favorite shows were PJ Masks, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and especially Paw Patrol. He would yell out “PAW Patrol to the rescue!” in his excitement for the TV show.

We don’t know much about Darnell’s early life, but it seems like all was not well at home. On March 25th, 2022, when Darnell was about 3 years old, a neighbor called 911 with a troubling report. According to the neighbor, a toddler was strapped into a stroller outside the 100 block of Buffalo Court, where Darnell’s family lived in Columbus. The caller stated that the little boy had been left outside alone for over an hour calling for his mother. Historical weather data shows temperatures on that day were below 50 degrees.

Police responded, as well as a child services caseworker. According to the caseworker’s report, Darnell’s mother, Leticia, said that she left the child outside to punish him for calling her a bad name. She said he had only been out there for 5 minutes, contrary to what the neighbor had reported. However, she also made concerning remarks to the police, including mentions of previous physical mistreatment, though it is unclear who may have committed these acts. According to the report, she kept repeating she wanted her son to die, she was hoping he would be kidnapped, and that is why she left him outside in the stroller.

Darnell was taken to the Franklin County Child Services, and his mother was taken to Grant Medical Center after she made remarks to the officers that led them to believe that she was a danger to herself and others. Leticia was not charged with a crime for this incident, and details have not been released about what happened to Darnell immediately afterwards.

Sometime between March of 2022 and May of 2023, Darnell’s paternal grandparents, Towanda and Anthony Baines, began taking care of him. Despite their love for their grandson and his bubbly personality, taking care of a toddler proved to be too much for them, so they began looking for an alternate home for Darnell. According to Anthony, “Darnell’s kind of rough. We couldn’t handle him. I hate to say we couldn’t handle him, but we didn’t want him in the system.”

Towanda and Anthony turned to a close family friend named Pammy May. She was about 47 years old, but the family had known her since she was five. She and her husband took custody of Darnell in May of 2023 and gained legal custodianship in the next couple of months. He continued to live with Pammy and her husband at their home on Reeb Avenue in Columbus.

Unfortunately, giving Pammy custody of Darnell turned out to have dire consequences. On Wednesday, February 14th, 2024, police issued an Amber Alert for 5-year-old Darnell. Pammy’s husband had called 911 at 3:03 a.m. to report that his wife had woken him up and made statements that made him believe that Darnell could be hurt. In the 911 recording, Pammy can be heard screaming in the background. She had apparently put her hand over her husband’s mouth to try to prevent him from telling police what happened.

The call was muffled and very hard to understand, but the caller was able to say that his wife just woke him up to tell him that she killed their foster child. While on the phone, he said that she was running out of the house and taking his gray Jeep Cherokee. The dispatcher asked if Pammy had said how she did it, and he responded, “No, she just woke me up and said he’s not here no more. I asked, ‘what did you do to him?’ and she said he’s not alive.” He said that when he tried to grab the phone to call 911, she started fighting him. He also said that she told him she had a plan, and that’s when he told her he was not going to go to jail for her.

The dispatcher asked when was the last time he had seen Darnell, and he said it was earlier that morning before he left for work at 10:00 a.m. He got home at around 10:30 p.m. but didn’t check on Darnell because he doesn’t normally do so when he gets home from work. He took a shower and went right to bed as usual. The dispatcher asked if Pammy had any medical conditions, and he replied that his wife had depression and bipolar disorder, but had been fine since taking medication. He agreed that this was completely out of character for Pammy.

During the chaotic 911 call, the dispatcher asked for details. The husband frantically replied, “I just… our bed… his bedroom, he is not here. She’s running out the house now. She’s taking my car and she’s running out the house now.” The dispatcher asked, “Okay, what’s her name? Is she white, black, or Hispanic?” He replied, “She’s black. Pammy May, P-A-M-M-Y.” He described the car as a gray Jeep, giving the license plate digits before adding, “She’s out of the driveway now… headed towards Lockbourne and Reeb now.”

When asked if she gave any details on what she did, he told the dispatcher: “No, she just woke me up and said he’s not here no more. I said, ‘what did you do to him?’ She says he’s not alive. And then when I tried to grab the phone to call you, she started fighting me. I got up to check his room because I didn’t get in till 10:30 and I didn’t see him tonight. I came straight home, took a shower, and went to bed. I didn’t even check in on him ’cause I usually don’t when I get home because I want to sleep. And now she’s saying… she just woke me up and just told me, ‘I got something serious to tell you.’ And I said what? And that’s what she told me. She’s not here anymore. She talked about she got a plan. I’m not going to jail for her… This is completely out of character for her, very much so. She wakes me up about 15 minutes ago and said, ‘I got something serious to tell you.’ I said what? She said, ‘shut your phone off.’ So I shut the phone off and said what happened? She said, ‘not here anymore.’ I said what do you mean, where did he go? He’s like, ‘he’s not alive anymore.'”

The local police arrived within 5 minutes and spoke to Pammy’s husband, who repeated what he had told the 911 dispatcher. Police first searched the home in the 900 block of Reeb Avenue in Columbus, and then they notified the Ohio State Highway Patrol and Franklin County Sheriff’s Office at 3:18 a.m. Dash cam footage from the initial responding officer shows that he actually passed the gray Jeep on the way to the scene, but since the Jeep didn’t have a front license plate, it wasn’t noticed. As officials continued to search the area on foot and with K-9s, officials with a special investigation bureau were asked to investigate alongside officers.

At 3:40 a.m., the Columbus Police decided to escalate the situation and asked the highway patrol to send out an Amber Alert for Darnell. At 5:09 a.m., the alert was sent out to phones around the state. A second Amber Alert was sent out shortly before 6:00 a.m. when a license plate reader got a hit on the vehicle in the Cleveland area. The Amber Alert asked for the public to be on the lookout for a gray 2015 Jeep Cherokee with a license plate JIGGZ2. Darnell was described as a black male, age 5, with black hair and brown eyes, and might have been wearing Spider-Man pajamas and white boots. Pammy was described as a black female, age 48, 4 feet 9 inches tall, 115 lbs, with brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a green floral nightgown and pink shoes.

Shortly after the license plate hit, the gray Jeep was located at 5:50 a.m. at Parkview Estates, located at 9841 Memphis Avenue, which is an apartment complex in the suburb of Brooklyn, Ohio. Pammy and Darnell were nowhere to be found. A warrant was issued for Pammy’s arrest for first-degree felony kidnapping and first-degree felony child endangerment. Local, state, and federal officials continued to search the area. Investigators were at the May residence all day and could be seen carrying evidence from the house. Pammy’s husband was cooperating fully with the investigation.

At a press conference that afternoon, Columbus Police Chief Elaine Bryant was asked if they believe that Darnell was still alive. She said, “We have no idea what we’re dealing with right now. That’s why we’re asking for the public’s assistance. Any information you can give us, we would greatly appreciate it. Based on this investigation, we are going to continue to follow every lead we have. We will continue to do so until we have located Darnell and Pammy.”

Darnell’s grandparents, Towanda and Anthony, who had previously been taking care of Darnell, spoke with the news the day after Darnell’s abduction. They hadn’t seen their grandson since July of 2023, not long after Pammy and her husband gained legal custody of him. The family said Pammy used to attend every birthday cookout and holiday but stopped answering calls out of nowhere. Towanda said they tried to contact Pammy with no luck, saying, “We’ve been out there to their home, knocking on the front door, the side door, no answer.” According to Anthony, “We thought maybe she was keeping him from us so he can be a part of their family first, but 6 months… that’s a long time.”

Both Darnell’s maternal and paternal grandparents had gone to court to get visitation for their grandson. Pammy had blocked their calls, and they weren’t able to get a hold of the couple to have regular visitation. Another court hearing had been scheduled for March 11th. The family said that they were hoping and praying for a good outcome. Towanda pleaded, “Pammy, just bring him home. Come on back wherever you’re at.”

A little after 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 15th, Brooklyn police officers were called to an envelope manufacturing business located at 4500 Tiedeman Road for a report of a woman walking suspiciously. She wandered into the business wearing a tan overcoat and her nightgown. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. She refused to give her name but asked workers at the business to call her husband. He couldn’t be reached, and the workers called 911 instead. During the call, the woman spoke on the phone to the dispatcher but continued to beg them to call Antoine and wouldn’t give her name.

When the police arrived, they found the woman distraught and crying. They immediately identified her as Pammy May, and she was transported to a nearby hospital for treatment. Investigators interviewed Pammy at the hospital, and she revealed where they could locate Darnell. She told the police that she left Darnell’s body in a sewage drain in the 1000 block of Marsdale Avenue in Southwest Columbus.

With this information, investigators located little Darnell’s body shortly after 1:00 a.m. on Friday. They could not reveal details about Darnell’s cause of death because the case was now being considered a homicide investigation. Darnell’s biological parents were informed that a body believed to be their child had been found. At 1:30 p.m. on Friday, family members identified the body as Darnell using postmortem photos. The Amber Alert for Darnell was cancelled.

On Sunday, February 18th, Pammy was taken from the hospital and booked into the Cuyahoga County Jail on charges of kidnapping and child endangerment. Authorities were in the process of getting her formally charged with homicide and extradited back to Columbus. Police gave an update stating, “We have reached a pivotal point in this investigation. We have very unfortunate news to share. Early this morning, we recovered the body of who we believe to be Darnell. This is a tragic development, and we certainly hoped for a different outcome.”

Pammy had no criminal record prior to Darnell’s death. The previous October, her husband had called 911 to report that Pammy had not returned home for 2 hours later than planned. Her phone went to voicemail, and no other family members had made contact with her. After determining that she hadn’t been involved in a traffic crash or other incident, an officer was sent to their house to take a missing person’s report. However, no report was actually made, so it seems that Pammy had made contact with her family and the case was dropped. There was no mention of Darnell during this incident.

The police were called again 2 weeks later for a dispute over the neighbors’ chickens, but again no report was taken. On three other occasions since 2021, the police responded to the address to accompany the fire department on unspecified medical issues, but otherwise, there was no police involvement with the May family until Darnell’s abduction.

Darnell’s maternal grandmother, Shanda McGee, said in an interview that she felt like the system failed her grandson. She said she repeatedly told the caseworker for Franklin County Children’s Services about concerns that she had regarding Pammy and felt like grandparents’ rights weren’t being enforced. She said, “As a caseworker, you should have stepped up, even if you had to take law enforcement to the house and say you guys are not abiding by the grandparents.” She said what hurts most is that Darnell will never get to grow up and enjoy a full life, saying, “That really broke my heart because it’s like, first of all, why did you do that? Then you threw him out in the sewage like he was a piece of trash.”

The sewer drain where Pammy threw away Darnell soon became the site of a memorial. Neighbors and strangers began leaving toys, balloons, candles, and stuffed animals to remember the little boy. A neighbor who lived across the street from the sewage drain said of the memorial, “As far as I’m concerned, that’s going to stay there forever, as long as I live.”

On February 21st, Pammy was extradited back to Columbus into the Franklin County Jail and charged with homicide. According to court documents, Pammy had allegedly suffocated Darnell inside her home around 11:00 p.m. on February 13th, then later admitted to hiding his body in a sewer drain. During her arraignment, Pammy wore a beige jumpsuit but showed no emotion. She stared blankly ahead during the video hearing, which lasted only 3 minutes before a Franklin County court judge ordered a $4 million bond.

Darnell’s abduction brought up some problems with the Amber Alert system in Ohio. Often when we tell these stories, we have cases where the information does not meet the Amber Alert criteria. In this case, however, all of the conditions were met. There was evidence that an abduction had taken place and that the child was in danger. There was a description of the suspect and their vehicle. So, an Amber Alert was sent out shortly after 5:00 a.m.

However, the Ohio State Highway Patrol soon found out that not all phones in the area received the alert. Those that did get the initial alert got a default message with no useful information. The message said, “Amber Alert in this area until February 14th, 6:28 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Execute action message from the state of Ohio.” The text should have included details about the abduction with a description of the child, the suspect, and the vehicle.

The glitch may have occurred because this was the first Amber Alert sent out since the highway patrol switched from a 90-character text limit to a 360-character text limit. Authorities found out about the glitch after the first Amber Alert for Darnell went out. It took more than a half an hour for that error to get sent back to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for the Amber Alert to be resent. This time, the alert went out to Cuyahoga County and surrounding counties, but not Central Ohio phones. This was because Pammy’s license plate had been picked up by an automated plate reader near the Cleveland area, more than 100 miles from where Darnell had been taken.

This glitch frustrated local authorities. Ohio State Highway Patrol Captain Ron Reigns said it’s critical that people receive an Amber Alert with the correct information. He said, “We treat this as though it is our own child. I have a daughter myself, most of our staff have kids, so as far as from a public safety perspective, we try to do everything that we can to make sure that the information is out there as quickly as possible.”

On Saturday, February 24th, twin brothers Devon and Tavon Woods, who grew up in the foster care system, walked a mile in Columbus to honor Darnell. The two were originally from South Carolina and went 17 years without knowing who their parents were. They walked for Darnell because when something like this tragedy occurs, it’s important to show up. Devon said, “My question to the world is, you know, when is it going to stop? When are the people in the world going to start taking these cases seriously? Because what we’ve been seeing is just child after child, and it’s like, after the kid dies, people talk about it for a couple of weeks, and then it’s just like another child that’s forgotten.”

On February 27th, a grand jury indicted Pammy for aggravated homicide, three counts of tampering with evidence, and abuse of a corpse. Her arraignment was scheduled for March 1st. Through her attorney, Samuel Shamansky, Pammy pled not guilty to each of the charges. Her previous bond set at $4 million remained in place. Her attorney asked the judge to consider moving Pammy from the Franklin County Jail to a secure psychiatric facility, saying, “This is going to be a mental health case through and through.”

On March 25th, Pammy appeared in court again, and her attorney told the judge that she was competent to stand trial. However, he said that her not-guilty plea was likely to change at a later date to Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. He asked the court for a mental health evaluation for Pammy, which was being considered at that time. According to Tyler McCoy, a Franklin County prosecutor, she has mental health issues, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, as well as possessive and controlling behaviors in the past.

However, according to former Franklin County prosecutor Ron O’Brien, to be proven Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity is not an easy task. He said, “If the defendant is pleading insanity, they must prove by a preponderance one, that they suffer from a mental disease or defect, and secondly, that as a result of that defect, they didn’t have the ability to distinguish right from wrong.” He said that the fact that she confessed to her husband that she killed Darnell could make it hard to prove that she didn’t know right from wrong. The fact that she also fled the scene and took trouble to hide the body could also indicate that she knew what she did was wrong.

In early April, police body cam footage taken during Pammy’s hospital stay was released. In the video, Pammy was lying in a hospital bed holding a cup of water. She openly talked about suffocating her son and didn’t seem to show any sort of remorse. Detectives asked her if there was any chance that Darnell was alive. She replied, “No, there isn’t. And I did it.”

In the video, she said that she caught Darnell eating snacks in bed the night before, which made her angry. She said he had a granola bar and peanut butter crackers in his bed, and he had a knife to open the box. She said he had also been in trouble previously for using profanity and that they didn’t have a good relationship. She said, “We are supposed to have a loving bond, and it wasn’t like that with me and my son. I didn’t like his behavior, so I was really harsh and mean to him.” She then planned out his death, saying, “This was all premeditated, not like I did it then.” She used the term premeditated multiple times during the interview.

Pammy described in detail how she went into Darnell’s room while he was taking a nap and suffocated him with a trash bag. She said she placed him in the trash bag, tied it shut, and waited until he stopped moving. She said, “I wasn’t even going to think about, you know, suffocating my son.” One of the detectives asked if Darnell moved at all during this, and she said, “When I first did it, no. 10 minutes later, I knew he was dead because he wasn’t moving.” At one point during the video, she said to one of the detectives, “At least you have children. I had a son, but I took his life, so yeah.”

Pammy said after she killed Darnell, she hid his body in a closet in another part of the house for several hours. When her husband got home, she waited for 2 hours after he went to bed, and then she moved Darnell’s body into the Jeep and began planning how to get rid of it. She said she put an old license plate over the vanity plate on the Jeep to make it less recognizable before driving to an area near her parents’ home. She found a manhole on Marsdale Avenue and shoved Darnell’s body into it. She then drove home and woke up her husband because she had something serious to tell him. It was then that she tried to cover his mouth when he made the 911 call. She said, “The only reason I fled in the nightgown was because I didn’t want the police to come and interrogate me, and I wanted to tell my husband, and he wasn’t listening.” She also said she was confessing everything in order to protect her husband.

The detectives showed Pammy a map of Columbus on their laptop, and she was able to pinpoint the area where they could find the sewage drain where she had dumped Darnell’s body. In June, an autopsy report showed that Darnell had died from asphyxia by smothering with cervical neck compression. In other words, his neck had been crushed, and he died by suffocation. The report also showed that Darnell’s body had begun to show signs of decomposition, that he had alcohol in his system, and that he had choked on what had been in his stomach at the time of his death. The report didn’t clarify whether the alcohol in the system was from ingesting alcohol itself or from certain medications like cough syrup, or if it was part of the decomposition process. Darnell also had bruises on parts of his face and his ear, bleeding in his eyes, and scars on his head and other extremities.

Pammy was scheduled to appear in court in May, but that had been pushed back to June. At the time of this recording, there have been no new updates for Pammy’s case because her trial is still pending. Full reports have not yet been made public. We may learn new details as the weeks and months continue. We must remind viewers that at this time, Pammy has pled not guilty to all charges and is still presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law. Time will tell if her plea stays the same, if it changes to Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, or if it changes altogether as part of a plea agreement.

When he was only 3 years old, Darnell Taylor was left outside in a stroller by his biological mother for the crime of calling her a bad name. She had allegedly hoped he would be kidnapped and she would be rid of her son. Darnell was then juggled from agency to agency before landing with his grandparents, who loved him but found the toddler to be too much to handle. The little boy was then handed off to Pammy, a friend that the family thought they knew, thought they could trust.

Pammy became his legal guardian, but Darnell was still denied a safe and loving home. The woman who called him her son suffocated him with a trash bag and stuffed his little body down a sewer drain. Why? Because he dared to eat a snack in bed. A granola bar and peanut butter crackers sent her over the edge. She plotted for hours on how to smother a child to death in his own bed. Now we just have to wait and see if Pammy is brought to justice for snuffing out the brief life of 5-year-old little Darnell.

Darnell’s funeral was held on March 8th, 2024, at the New Birth Christian Ministries in Columbus, Ohio. He was interred at the Easton Cemetery. If he has a headstone, we were unable to find a picture of it. For now, there’s that makeshift memorial on the side of the road marking the sewer drain where Pammy discarded Darnell’s body like trash. We hope that Darnell’s final resting place proves to be a more gentle and peaceful spot for the little boy whose life was taken from him far too soon.