Nine months after the death of three young Texas sisters, cops have yet to make an arrest after an official autopsy report released last month confirmed the girls were likely to have been strangled. For those who aren’t familiar with this tragic story, Zi’Ariel Robinson-Oliver, 9, A’Miyah Hughes, 8, and Te’Mari Robinson-Oliver, 5, were reported missing on July 28, 2022, in Atlanta, Texas. Per the police report, the three girls were being watched by their older cousin, Paris Propps, while their mother was at work. On July 29, all three bodies were found in a nearby pond.
At the time of their bodies being found, law enforcement officials believed that all three girls had drowned, but a medical examiner has since disputed those claims, saying there was evidence that they had been strangled. The Cass County District Attorney’s Office has since announced in a statement that they have opened a homicide investigation in the mysterious death of the siblings, who were also said to have “suffered lacerations to their faces.”
One can only imagine the suffering their family has had to endure these last few months, particularly the mother, who New Black Panther Nation leader Minister Quanell X says had already suspected that her daughters didn’t just drown in the pond. “She was told that they drowned, but she always had a suspicious feeling that the girls did not drown. Well, her suspicions were confirmed by the autopsies,” he said in a press conference held in Cass County earlier this month.
The district attorney’s office will evidently face a lot of pressure to find further evidence that can lead them to a potential suspect now that the autopsy findings have been released. But from their statement, it seems as if they are already getting closer to tracking down who could have been responsible for the senseless killings of these minors.
“Multiple witness statements have been obtained, DNA testing is ongoing, and the investigation will continue,” the DA office added. What’s particularly troubling about the case is that, according to reports, because of Cass County’s small population, the town doesn’t necessarily have the resources to investigate case involving three homicides.
Quanell argued that the reason their deaths were claimed to have stemmed from drowning was because of the “lazy” investigation that was performed after their bodies were discovered. What investigators were lacking was “the training that was necessary to properly address an investigative the crime scene,” he stressed.
Furthermore, with so much time having passed, it’s unclear whether the suspect (or suspects) are even still in the state, and that by allowing so much time to pass, law enforcement officials may have made it even harder to track down those responsible for the alleged murder.
As for why it’s taken so long to obtain the results from the autopsy, that apparently comes back down to the lack of resources in the town. “They send those autopsies off to a whole different county, hours away from that county to do the autopsy,” Quanell shared.
“If it was Gabby Petito, the world would have come to a stop,” forensic studies professor at Florida Gulf Coast University said.