Octavia Renee Rogers and her children Jaikare Rahaman, 8, Jeremiah Adams, 5, and Avery Robinson, 2 months old. (Photos Courtesy of Facebook and The Phoenix Police Department)
A Black Arizona woman is suspected of fatally stabbing and mutilating her three sons before attempting suicide, Phoenix police announced.
Octavia Renee Rogers is in the hospital in critical condition with self-inflicted stab wounds and her sons Jaikare Rahaman, 8, Jeremiah Adams, 5, and Avery Robinson, 2 months old, are dead, Phoenix Police Sgt. Trent Crump said, according to ABC News.
According to a police account, Rogers’ brother returned home late the night of June 1 and conversed with the 29-year-old woman, who reportedly talked about God and said she’d found the answer to life. She then went into the house and barricaded herself in a room. Sometime later, she emerged covered in blood with stab wounds on her neck and abdomen. She also tried to drown herself in the tub, the brother reported and that is when he called police.
Officers responded at about 2 a.m. but they didn’t discover the boys until well after the woman had been carried to the hospital since, authorities said. The dead children were found in a stuffed closet; the baby’s body was in a suitcase.
Crump said the children appeared to have been stabbed to death and “parts of their bodies were dismembered.”
It was “an absolutely horrific scene for the officers and the brother,” Crump added. “Nobody wants to see this happen to a child, nobody.”
According to The Associated Press, Rogers’ mother said she believed her daughter was suffering from postpartum depression since she had been a good mother and was not a drug addict.
Rogers, however, had been the object of child welfare investigations, including cases in 2011 and 2016 based on allegations of marijuana use. In all cases, the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) found no reasons or legal grounds to take the children into emergency care.
With the boys’ death, DCS Director Gregory McKay said the department is assisting the police in the investigation and will also do an internal audit to ensure it is not allowing vulnerable children to fall through the cracks.
“When a child is murdered, it’s common to ask if something could have been done to prevent such a tragedy,” McKay said in a statement. “At DCS, we ask ourselves those questions because we take the responsibility of protecting children very seriously. But our powers are limited; we cannot predict the future; and people, can at times, do awful things.”