NEWSTexas Mom Sentenced To 20 Years For Dumping Daughter In Lake, Dressed Doll Like Her
When a Texas mom made a distressed 911 call and claimed that her 2-year-old child had gone missing, no one could have predicted the outcome. Police later discovered a life-sized doll wearing her daughter's clothing in a trash can while her toddler was found dead in a lake.
Tiaundra Christon had returned to College Station after she visited her boyfriend in Houston, Texas. Friends believed that Christon was spotted with her daughter, Hazana Anderson, as they saw a glimpse of her. CCTV footage showed Christon pushing what looked to be her daughter in a stroller in a Walmart.
At least 163 people, including cops and first responders, were looking for Anderson ever since Christon called the police on October 28, 2018. Eventually, police found a doll the same size as Anderson in the trash across the street from where Christon had parked her car.
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After the doll was found, Christon confirmed that the clothes were Anderson’s but had no knowledge of how they got on the doll and was arrested for a false police report and for abandoning and endangering a child.
Investigators soon learned that Anderson died several days earlier, and her mom and boyfriend, Kenny Hewett, had panicked and dumped the body into a lake and got the doll as a cover-up.
Christon confessed later that her daughter died in the hotel room "after the baby suffered abuse from Hewett and Christon." According to a probable cause affidavit, Hewett left the hotel room with the child on October 19, 2018, but returned after 30 minutes, with Anderson crying.
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Hewett then began to beat the child with his belt and encouraged the mom to join in, but he claimed she wasn’t hitting her daughter hard enough. Christon then noticed that her daughter had begun to slip in and out of consciousness, so she decided to revive her in a bathtub. According to the affidavit, Christon noticed the toddler had been sexually abused.
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The couple then tried to warm Anderson up with a hairdryer as she was cold, but that ultimately burned her skin, and the little girl died that night.
Christon hid the body in her car for three days before the couple wrapped Anderson in a bag and tied a heavy rock to it, and then dumped her in the lake. Authorities later found Anderson’s remains in Moses Lake.
A medical examiner testified that the injuries that caused bruising would not have been enough to kill Anderson but wasn’t able to determine an injury to lead to a homicide charge.
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On Monday, December 14, Christon was sentenced to 20 years in prison for tampering with a corpse, while her boyfriend received the same sentence last year.
At the time, Anderson’s father, Tabodrick Anderson, told KPRC that his daughter was everything to him, but Christon was not as devoted as a parent after they broke up and started "pushing off my daughter on me a lot more. She started disappearing, leaving my daughter for me for weeks."
Tabodrick "kind of feels like I let my daughter down," adding that it seemed like Christon "didn’t show the responsibility and the love that she once did or spoke about. It’s like when she got to live her life, got that bit of freedom, that’s all she wanted."
