GIRL KEPT SILENT TO PROTECT BROTHER AFTER FATHER'S RAMPAGE (590 hits)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — For two weeks, police said, a 10-year-old girl went to school terrified that her father would kill her and her 2-year-old brother if she told anybody what had happened at home.

Her mother was missing, and her two sisters, ages 13 and 1, had already been killed. Their bodies were locked in an upstairs bedroom of the family’s south Charlotte apartment, police said.

So the little girl said nothing until Monday, when police began to unravel a grisly series of crimes they say were committed by a package handler who hinted at family troubles on his Facebook page.

"What this man did was despicable and cowardly," police Capt. Paul Zinkann told reporters, fighting tears at one point.

"She continued to go to school. ... She felt that she needed to maintain some composure," he said. "She did not ask any questions because she didn’t want her little brother killed."

The killings began about two weeks ago, police said, with the slaying of 35-year-old Nateesha Ward Chapman. Police say her husband, Kenneth Jermaine Chapman, suffocated her in an apartment, from which the family had recently moved.

Within a day of her killing, police say, two of Nateesha Chapman’s daughters were also slain, in the family’s new apartment around the corner. Nakyiah Jael Chapman, 1, was suffocated and Na’Jhae Parker, 13, was stabbed.

Late Monday, a family member asked police to check on Nateesha because he hadn’t heard from her. When officers knocked on the family’s door, police said, two children ran out and Chapman fired a shot at the officers. Chapman then fatally shot himself.

Investigators gleaned most of their information from the 10-year-old girl who escaped with her 2-year-old brother Monday. Police have not released her name. The children are with relatives.

The girl told police she knew her mother was dead in mid-March, after her parents had a fight one night. The next day after school, "She came home and she never saw her mother again," Zinkann said.

Later that day, the girl heard her sisters screaming upstairs. Then silence.

After that, the door to an upstairs bedroom remained locked.

Over the next two weeks, the girl’s father didn’t talk about her missing family members, she told police. He only asked her occasionally if she smelled anything. The girl tried to protect her little brother by acting as if she suspected nothing.

Playmates would come to the door asking for her older sister, and the girl was instructed by her father to lie about her sister’s whereabouts, police said.

Worried family members would call the house, police said, and Kenneth Chapman would say his wife was busy or at work or not available by cell phone.

Officials at McClintock Middle School called the home twice after eighth grader Na’Jhae Parker began accumulating absences. They spoke to the father, who said she had health problems.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Thursday, April 1st 2010 at 12:05PM
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