Mother of Arius Williams, charged with killing 2-year-old son Montrell, weighed getting him psychiatric help

Yahoo

9 hours ago

The mother of Arius Williams, accused of tossing his 2-year-old son Montrell into the Bronx River, had met with a lawyer to discuss having the troubled young father committed to a psychiatric institution, family members told the Daily News in an exclusive interview.
'I kept telling her, 'You need to put him away,'' said Williams' cousin Berniece, recounting a string of violent episodes involving the 20-year-old father. 'She kept saying she was going to put him away.
'Obviously she didn't.'
As the gruesome details of Montrell's death unfolded, dueling profiles have emerged of Williams — one remarkably describing him as a loving father and another deriding him as a monster.
Both assessments come from within his own family.
The horrific chain of events that led to Williams' arrest and the death of the playful toddler actually began after he stormed out of a Mother's Day celebration following an argument with his own mother, Sabrina Williams.
Relatives said Arius Williams, 20, took the boy with him, and Montrell was never seen again.
Yet it was Williams' stepfather, Leroy Burton, Sabrina's husband, who was standing up for the suspected murderer.
'He loved Montrell,' Burton said. 'He loved his son, because he always had his eye on him. I don't know what the hell happened.'
But the dad whom Burton described was not the father the rest of the family knew. They said Williams was so abusive, to even his own relatives, that they didn't trust him around the child.
'He didn't give a damn,' said Williams' aunt, Alicia Williams, the sister of Williams' mother. 'Arius is Satan, just an evil boy.'
Still, even in their worst nightmares, Williams' relatives said they never thought he would take out his frustrations on a helpless child, and leave him somewhere for dead.
Investigators said they weren't certain, either, until they fished Montrell's little body out of the East River, miles away from the spot where police said a surveillance camera captured Williams tossing something into the water weeks earlier from a Bruckner Expressway overpass.
The decomposing body was still dressed in the Calvin Klein t-shirt he was wearing when he disappeared with his dad a month ago, officials said.
The body recovered Wednesday was found about two miles from where the Bronx River flows into the East River.
Cops began searching the river after Williams, upon being confronted by the boy's 17-year-old mother about the child's whereabouts, allegedly threatened her with a knife and told her that he had thrown their son into the river.
Until then, Williams' relatives said, cops had been reluctant to do much to help because the parents had joint custody, and a child off with his custodial father wasn't considered missing.
But Williams was no doting dad, his own relatives said. His aunt and two cousins traded stories about how volatile Williams was to even his own mother and the mother of his child.
Not even Montrell could escape his father's abuse, she said.
'Arius' mother kept calling me and telling me that he was wishing that she was dead, that he was going to stab her,' the aunt said. 'She'll die before him. He'll kill her with a pillow, or some s—t like that.'
Because of his violent nature, Williams was not permitted by his own family to be alone unsupervised with Montrell, relatives said. Usually, it was Williams' mother who looked after the child, family members said.
'You can imagine why they didn't want him alone with Montrell,' Alicia, the aunt, said. 'He wouldn't change his diaper, he wouldn't go to the store. My sister did it all.'
'[Arius' mother] was the one watching him, taking care of him,' said Arius' cousin Berniece. 'He didn't do s—t. He didn't raise him at all.'
But Burton, the stepfather, refuted claims that Williams was violent toward his family. A police source said he has one unsealed arrest for theft of service at the Grand Concourse train station in October 2024, when he was 19. He was also arrested for shoving his girlfriend into a wall two years ago, but that case has been adjudicated and sealed, the source said.
Burton acknowledged that Williams was arrested for a domestic assault incident involving Montrell's mother. But Burton said he believed the accusation was false.
Burton said Williams was looking to move out of his mother's apartment and had stayed at a homeless shelter for a week prior to the Mother's Day incident.
Following his stay at the shelter, Burton said Willams was acting strange, and said he believes someone gave him spiked weed while he was staying in the shelter.
'When he came back, that wasn't the same Arius.' Burton said. 'Whatever they put in his weed, it messed his brain up. I want them to give him a psych evaluation.'
Berniece, his cousin, said it was more than just the marijuana. Family or not, she said she wants to see her cousin pay.
'I'm the last person he'd want to see,' she said. 'I would take his head off. There ain't no conversation between me and that boy. I hope he suffers. He better suffer. He better suffer at Rikers. I hope they beat his a–. In Rikers, they don't like that s—t. I hope they beat the s—t out of him.'