A Texas community is reeling after police say a Houston mother admitted to drowning two of her children in a bathtub and stashing their bodies beneath a neighbor’s home.
Sheborah Thomas, 30, faces two counts of capital murder after her 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter were found dead Sunday morning, Houston police said.
The children have been identified as Orayln Thomas, 7, and Kahana Thomas, 5. (Both children’s names have been spelled differently in various news reports; police would not confirm the spellings to The Huffington Post.) Thomas also has a 12-year-old son who has not been harmed, police told local media.
Thomas allegedly told police that she killed her two younger children Friday morning and put their bodies, wrapped in bedsheets, in a trash can behind her house.
The next day, she allegedly tried to bury them near the side of her house but was unable to dig a hole deep enough. Police say she then moved the bodies to an area beneath her neighbor’s home.
A man who knows Thomas reportedly spotted her throwing trash in a vacant lot near her home on Sunday. Thomas told the man that she was moving, and he offered to help her pack, police told WFAA.
When the man asked Thomas about her children, she allegedly replied that she killed them, which the man initially took for a joke. After he asked again and Thomas gave the same answer, the man drove her to the police station, where police say she confessed to authorities.
“She was very matter-of-fact in terms of what she stated she had done,” Kesc Smith, a spokesperson for the Houston Police Department, told WFAA.
Kita Thomas-Smith, who identified herself as the children’s aunt, said the kids’ father is incarcerated and doesn’t yet know what happened.
“How am I going to tell my brother about his kids?” she cried.
Thomas-Smith said she’d previously helped take care of Thomas’ children and would have done it again if asked.
“I’m just a phone call away,” she said. “I would have come and got these kids.”
A spokeswoman for Houston’s Child Protective Services confirmed to the Houston Chronicle that the agency had previously dealt with Thomas. She declined to provide details.
Thomas-Smith told the Chronicle that Thomas had no mental health issues that she knew of.
Thomas’ neighbors told local media that she had seemed to take good care of her kids, and that the family had appeared happy.
“She made sure she kept the kids clean,” neighbor Shirley Baines told KHOU of Thomas. “She takes care of them. She goes to the store... To me she was like, a real nice person.”
As of Monday morning, a GoFundMe page reportedly set up by Thomas-Smith had raised over $1,000 to pay for the children’s funeral services.
