Malayshia Alford was 10 years old and a ward of Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services (DHS) when she died. Her body was found Wednesday night in the trunk of a car in Lindenwold, New Jersey, 10 days after she was reported missing. On Thursday, prosecutors charged her foster mother, Carprice Williams, 36, with murder.
Williams is also charged with endangering the welfare of a child, tampering with evidence and abuse of a corpse. She was denied bail. She is presumed innocent, and she has not been tried.
What prosecutors have said is hard to read. A medical examiner ruled the death a homicide from blunt force trauma. Prosecutors told reporters Malayshia “was beaten to death by Williams.” She was last seen alive on Oct. 22, coming home from school at the family’s home on North Simpson Street in West Philadelphia. Surveillance video, they say, shows a body carried out in a bag before 2 a.m. on Oct. 26, the day Williams reported the girl missing. Police believe at least one other person helped dispose of the remains. A relative led them to the car.
Williams, a teacher at Cassidy Elementary, told relatives Malayshia had gone to her biological mother’s home. She had not.
The question the city now has to answer is who was watching. Malayshia’s father, Nazir Alford, spent years trying to get her back, according to Atlanta Black Star. Her aunt, Nyfisha Alford, said she tried too. “I tried to get her,” she said. “They came to my home, they looked it over, and then I was ignored.”
District Attorney Larry Krasner said: “There are no words we can say to ease her family’s pain from this unimaginable loss.” Mayor Cherelle Parker said the death had “shaken me to my core.” Neither has said whether DHS will review how Malayshia was placed, how often she was visited, or why her relatives were not chosen.
Those are not new questions in Philadelphia. In February 2023, 2-year-old Su’Layah Williams was kicked to death in a West Philadelphia home where DHS had placed her over her mother’s objection. Her mother, Tytianna Hawthorne, told 6abc she believed her daughter would be alive without the placement. A woman’s partner was charged with murder. The Inquirer reported last year that nearly 70 lawsuits have been filed since 2012 against the private agencies DHS pays to supervise foster children, and that 14 of those cases involve a child in foster care who died.
Black families carry the weight of this system. A Juvenile Law Center report found that Pennsylvania’s Black youth are more likely than other children to be placed in foster care and to stay there. When a state takes a child from a home and keeps her from relatives who ask for her, it takes on a duty to know where she is and who she is with.
Philadelphia broke that duty to Malayshia, or it did not. The public is owed which. Council should demand DHS’s full file on her placement, the home studies of her relatives and every visit log, and release them. Williams is due back in court on the murder charge.
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