On January 6th, at 9 am, a number of angry and grieving people will gather in the Wayne County Circuit Court, where Judge Ulysses Boykin will sentence 23-year-old Darnell Cheatham for crimes of torture, murder, arson, child abuse, and mutilation of a dead body.
Cheatham, a resident of Detroit, was dating the aunt of little Mariah Smith, a 5-year-old girl who also lived in Detroit. According to information made public by Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, Cheatham stole Mariah away from her home on the city’s east side in July of 2011.
Prosecutor’s office says that Cheatham raped her
Hours later, firefighters from the Detroit Fire Department pulled her burned body from an abandoned house that was engulfed in flames. In between her disappearance and the grisly discovery of her body, the prosecutor’s office says that Cheatham raped her, strangled her, crushed her skull, and then set her body on fire on an old mattress in a vacant house located less than a mile from her home.
There were many unanswered questions surrounding the evidence in this case, which caused problems for the prosecution at first. Quanita Smith, who was Mariah Smith’s aunt and Cheatham’s girlfriend, told investigators that she had seen the child lying on top of Cheatham in bed on the night before her disappearance, but had been too drunk to do anything about it at the time. However, it took her two years to own up to this fact, because she kept it a secret until recently.
There was also the fact that two distinctly separate semen samples were found on items of clothing that pertained to the case, neither of which was a match to Cheatham’s DNA.
Cheatham’s first trial ended in a mistrial in late July of 2014, when the jury was deadlocked during deliberations and unable to reach a decision about any of the charges. But the second trial has been a success for the prosecution. Cheatham was found guilty of second degree murder, torture, first degree child abuse, arson and mutilation of a dead body.
Under Michigan law, all of these crimes are felonies, and are punishable by anywhere from up to 10 years for mutilation of a dead body, to life in prison, which is the maximum sentence for first degree child abuse.