The Mother Who Mistook an Oven for a Crib

^[1]1,328 words / 9:23

Prosecutors in Kansas City, Missouri say that on Friday, February 9 — two days before the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl and five days before a lone Kansas City gunman shot and killed one person and injured over a dozen others during a post-Super Bowl victory parade ^[2] — a 26-year-old black woman named Mariah Thomas placed her month-old daughter Za’Riah in an oven, killing her. The hapless newborn had been living in a Kansas City house along with her mother, who was apparently uneducated, unemployed ^[3], and still living with her parents.

The child’s grandfather claims his daughter frantically called him on Friday afternoon howling that “something was wrong with the baby and that he needed to return home immediately.” He says he smelled smoke upon entering the house and found his granddaughter dead in her crib.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here ^[4]. To download the mp3, right-click here ^[4] and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

https://counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Goad-TheMotherWhoMistookAnOvenForACrib.m4a ^[4]

According to a press release ^[5] from the prosecutor’s office:

Kansas City police responded to a residence after being dispatched on a report of a non-breathing infant. Responders observed the 1-month-old child with apparent burns. They were told the mother of the child was putting the child down for a nap and accidentally placed the child in the oven instead of the crib.

Police arrested Mariah Thomas and charged her with “Endangering the Welfare of a Child in the 1st Degree, Death of a Child.” The charging documents ^[6] quote Thomas as saying, “I thought I put [Za’Riah] in her crib and I accidentally put her in the oven.” The criminal complaint describes what police saw when they arrived at the house:

The victim had sustained apparent thermal injuries on various parts of her body. She was clothed in a bodysuit over a diaper. The clothing appeared to have melted onto the diaper, and it was very dirty, possibly burned on the backside. A baby blanket with significant burn marks was located in the living room and was collected.

“Mariah has been dealing with mental illnesses since [she was] a child,” an unnamed “close friend ^[7]” of the accused told the Daily Beast.

She thought everyone only likes her because her daughter was born, and she didn’t like that at all. She wanted everyone’s attention, too, just like Za’Riah was getting attention. . . . I know Mariah didn’t do it on purpose. . . . She didn’t mean to hurt her baby. . . . She loved her baby dearly.

So is it fair to assume she loved the baby dearly, but she loved getting attention even more?

Mariah Thomas’ Facebook page ^[8] reveals her as your run-of-the-mill dumb basic fat black bitch, with multiple pictures of her high on weed ^[9], nuzzling up to liquor bottles ^[10], and flipping the bird ^[11].

Little Za’Riah was apparently not the unemployed and uneducated mom’s first child, because on March 19 of last year, mama posted an apparent solicitation for new sperm donors titled “who Trying to Give Me Another Kid? ^[12]” Someone obviously stepped into the batter’s box and swung, because within a few months, Thomas was posting snaps of her disgustingly bloated ^[13] pregnant belly and scans of the doomed fetus ^[14] in utero.

On January 15 ^[15], which is likely when the li’l black pup was about a week old, her mom ominously posted:

I won’t be on here don’t inbox me or none of that I don’t fuck with ya’ll I’m done being fucking nice . . . like I said before y’all only fucking with me cause of my daughter & I said what I said.

Well, if she said what she said, one can only infer that it is what it is, and I have no other choice but to conclude that it’s all good.

At 1:55 PM on February 8 — Thomas’ 26th birthday — she posted a picture of her newborn ^[16] and wrote, “Twin, Where Have You Been? Nobody Knows Me Like You Do Za’Riah Mae.”

The next day, medical technicians would be carting away Za’Riah’s charred one-month-old corpse.

This is not the first case of a parent baking their child to death either on purpose or by negligence, although it is to my knowledge the first time a parent claimed she mistook the oven for a crib and apparently expected everyone to believe her.

The “Baby-Roast ^[19],” AKA the “Cooked Baby” and “The Hippy Babysitter,” is a time-honored urban legend. At least over the past quarter-century, though, the legend has been replicated multiple times in real life. Last year in Atlanta, police charged 24-year-old Lamora Williams ^[20] with baking her one- and two-year-old children in an oven and possibly leaving them there for a few days, to the point where neighbors said they noticed that the apartment “smelled like death ^[21].”

In 2018, Mississippi police arrested 48-year-old Carolyn Jones ^[22] and charged her with stabbing her 20-month-old granddaughter before placing her in an oven and cooking her alive ^[23].

In 2015, Houston police charged 25-year-old Racqual Thompson ^[24] and her boyfriend Cornell Malone with child endangerment when Thompson’s 19-month-old daughter J’Zyra — I don’t come up with these names, I merely report them — died after a three-year-old sibling popped her in an oven and baked her to death. Neither the baby’s mom, nor her boyfriend with the inimitably black name of Cornell Malone, were apparently home at the time of the infanticidal incineration.

In 2005, after arguing with her unquestionably black boyfriend Terrell Talley over whether he’d actually fathered her 28-day-old daughter Paris, 25-year-old China Arnold ^[25] of Dayton, Ohio shoved the infant into a microwave oven ^[26], turned it on for two minutes, and then removed the baby, who was already dead from “high-heat internal injuries.”

Those are all the cases I know about blacks baking their own babies. I’m sure I missed a few humdingers. But to be fair, it’s not only blacks who do this.

After all, Asians are known for ruthlessly slaughtering their infants for the slightest imperfection or indiscretion. I’ve heard it’s some kind of cultural thing with them. Ka Yang ^[27], a slant-eyed mother of four from Sacramento, intentionally shoved her baby girl into a microwave and nuked it ^[28] one day in 2011 after reportedly becoming annoyed that the baby “was being irritable and fussy and holding her back from her work.”

In 2007, allegedly “upset because his wife didn’t love him,” a 20-year-old white Texan named Joshua Mauldin ^[29] tossed his two-month-old daughter Ava inside a microwave and zapped her for ten to 20 seconds. Mind you, this was after he’d punched her and also placed her in “a refrigerator and a hotel room safe.” The baby survived but suffered permanent physical and psychological scarring.

In 1999, a 20-year-old white Virginia woman named Elizabeth Renee Otte ^[30] placed her newborn son in a microwave and turned on the juice, killing him. Otte, a confirmed epileptic, only served five years in prison because she claimed she’d suffered a seizure the day of her baby’s death — and the judge apparently bought it ^[31].

I’m unaware of whether Ms. Otte or her lawyers attempted to prove she’d had a seizure that day, but since she had a record of epilepsy, it’s at least more plausible than trying to get someone to believe you actually thought an oven was a crib.

This leads to two possibilities: Miz Mariah Thomas either turned the oven on while putting little Za’Riah in it, or it was already heated.

Which leads to two more possibilities: Either Mariah Thomas, that supremely unlikeable and terminally unemployable obese black baby mama from America’s Heartland, is actually dumb enough — or was high enough — to think an oven was a crib, or she purposely murdered her baby and thought the rest of the world was even dumber than she is and would swallow her alibi without blinking.

So is it worse to accidentally kill your baby because you’re dumber than a half-chewed stick of dried salamander jerky, or because you were jealous that the little creature was getting more “likes” on social media than you were?

I’ll be back to answer that, but if you’ll excuse me, I have to throw up.

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