Mother of three girls in July strangulation case speaks to Nancy Grace, The Daily Beast

About two weeks ago, a press release from the Cass County, Texas District Attorney’s Office classified the death of three sisters pulled from a pond just outside Atlanta on Texas Highway 77 last July as a homicide.

Since then, Shommaonique ‘Bre’ Oliver- Wickerson, the mother of Zi’Ariel Robinson-Oliver, A’Miyah Hughes, Te’Mari Robinson-Oliver, has been using her platform to speak out with outlets such as Nancy Grace’s Crime Talk podcast and The Daily Beast to talk about what she’s learned since finding out that her children were murdered.

“Autopsy reports concluded the manner of death for all three girls was a homicide, indicating evidence of strangulation,” Cass County District Attorney Courtney Shelton released. All three girls also suffered ‘lacerations’ to their faces, she said.

Experts have said the lacerations would have to have occurred before or at the time of death, which seems likely to have been from strangulation although Journal-Sun staff could not verify if any of the girls were found to have had air in their lungs.

“Multiple witness statements have been obtained, DNA testing is ongoing, and the investigation will continue,” Shelton said in the initial press release.

Since the manner of death was revealed for her three children, Oliver- Wickerson spoke to multiple large media outlets, such as the Daily Beast, saying she wants answers.

Oliver told them in her first interview since the release from the DA’s Office that she suspected “foul play from the jump.”

The three girls were reported missing at about 9:00 p.m. on July 29, 2022.

Shelton said they were reported missing by their male cousin, Paris Propps, who was responsible for the girls’ care at the time while Oliver- Wickerson worked at a care home facility in nearby Texarkana. Oliver-Wickerson’s other three children were located inside the home unharmed. Oliver told the Daily Beast her cousin, Propps, won’t get back to her. Oliver-Wickerson said he won’t answer phone calls or respond to emails for comment and that her cousin is also not speaking to investigators.

“All I want is justice for my babies,” Oliver-Wickerson told The Daily Beast.

While police investigate, Oliver-Wickerson said she has been harassed by total strangers on social media. She said people have called her a ‘deadbeat mom’ and that her kids are ‘better off’ dead.

Oliver-Wickerson said she urges others to put that energy into finding out what happened to her daughters, instead of harassing her.

Last week, Crime Stories podcast with Nancy Grace did a nearly 45-minute in-depth interview segment with Oliver- Wickerson about the tragedy, where Nancy Grace offered her condolences to the grieving mother, who is called Bre Bre by her friends.

Together, Nancy Grace and Oliver-Wickerson walked through what happened the night her children were found in the pond and the aftermath following.

Nancy Grace and Oliver-Wilkerson pinpointed a 9 p.m. phone call at the nurse’s station that night as the point that changed her life in the most heinous of ways. The phone call was from her cousin, Propps, who was babysitting her six children in Atlanta.

“When I got a call the only thing my cousin had said was that my kids were missing,” Oliver- Wickerson told Grace. “He (Paris Propps) didn’t specifically say which kid or how many kids, he just said kids, leaving me thinking all my kids.”

The mother said she was changing a resident at the time of the phone call at the nurse’s station.

“Like, how did they end up missing when they were in the house,” Oliver-Wickerson said, adding that she wondered why her cousin was “just now calling me, shouldn’t (he) be calling 911 first, then calling me?”

The girl’s mother told Nancy Grace that she last talked to her children on a phone call between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. that evening, as she left for work at about 1:00 p.m. that afternoon. She said when she called to check on the kids while at work, they were “sitting down eating, watching TV on my floor.”

Oliver-Wickerson described a typical phone call between a mother and her children.

“I had asked them what they were going to do,” she said. “They were going to stay in the house finish eating, watching tv take a bath. It was getting dark (and) they know not to go outside when it gets dark because we don’t have a light outside.”

“So they knew to stay in the house,” she added.

Oliver-Wickerson told Nancy Grace that at the time, she had a seven-year-old, 10-yearold, nine-year-old, eight-year-old, a threeyear- old and a one-year-old The mother was supposed to have gotten off her mid-shift at the care facility, about a 25 minute drive from her home, at 10:00 p.m. when she got the 9:00 p.m. phone call from her cousin, she said.

“On the way (home) driving, I was trying to multitask and not wreck at the same time,” Oliver-Wickerson said. “So I was trying to multitask with one phone with the police on one line and then trying to call my aunt on the other line, just seeing if she can rush out there and meet me there or go out there and look for them until I get there.”

Authorities said by 10 p.m. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Game Wardens, Cass County fire and rescue crews and Cass County Sheriff’s office mounted the search for the girls, ages 9, 8, and 5.

Texas game wardens said they received the call about 10:00 p.m. that Friday night about three children missing and gathered their assets, went to the last known location of the children and brought in a K-9 unit which led authorities to a pond, about 200 yards away from the residence on neighboring property.

Nancy Grace asked Oliver-Wickerson if they would have ever gone to that pond on their own.

“No, we never knew about a pond being back there and I grew up out there my whole life so I never knew it was a pond out there,” Oliver-Wickerson affirmed. “My kids wouldn’t go in a field no way because there are animals out there cows and horses so they never would have set foot over there.”

Lt. Jason Jones said that during the search, they found a pair of tennis shoes right next to the water that they had family members identify as belonging to one of the missing girls.

“We actually found some footprints in the mud leading into the water, so that kind of narrowed our search even more,” Jones said.

Oliver-Wickerson told Nancy Grace she remembered having to identify clothing.

“When I got there, I heard my aunt and them out there in the field somewhere yelling for my kids,” she said. “My older daughter had to show us where to go to get back there to where they were and I saw my daughter’s shoes stacked up neatly beside the pond.”

“My daughter never stacks (her) shoes, she’ll throw them in the corner or something but she would never stack them on top of each other,” she added.

Oliver-WIckerson said only one pair of little girls’ tennis shoes, belonging to her 5-yearold Te’Mari was found stacked on top of each other in a “criss-cross way, with one pointed one direction and the other pointed the other direction.”

Oliver-Wickerson said her little girl would not have stacked her shoes at all, but definitely not that way.

Nancy Grace asked Oliver-Wickerson what was running through her mind when she heard her aunt calling out her children’s names.

“My first thought is like, why is she even in the field calling for them knowing that they never go in the field,” Oliver-Wickerson said. “It’s kind of strange to me, obviously. Like why are you out there? There is no reason to be out there.”

Authorities said a dive team located all three victims in the pond between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning, and the girls’ bodies were sent off for autopsy while the investigation was turned over to Texas Rangers.

The tragedy was discovered on County Road 3319 off Texas Highway 77, only 3-4 hours after the girls were reported as missing.

The girls’ mother recounted to Nancy Grace how she found out.

“Standing in my yard close to the fence toward the field,” Oliver-Wickerson said. “We were just waiting there (when) a few divers came back and we had asked them if they found anybody. They had told us no.”

“Then about 45 or 35 minutes later the sheriff, I think that was, came up and told us that they had pulled out a child’s body, one, out of the pond. I had them describe the person to me and it was my 8-year-old A’Miyah Hughes.”

The mother said the officer then asked her about some clothes that were in the pond.

“Some jackets that were tied up together,” she said. “There were about five to six feet into the pond is what he had told us and he showed us pictures…Those were my kid’s jackets but they were in the trash.”

Oliver-Wickerson said the jackets had been thrown into the trash as they were too small for the girls, yet they came from the trash and somehow ended up in the pond. The jackets were tied together “like a rope” she said.

It was at the hospital that Oliver-Wickerson found out that the bodies of Zi’Ariel and Te’Mari were recovered soon after.

“After they told me about A’Miyah, I was took off to the hospital because I was having a heart attack,” she said. The mother was taken to the nearby hospital in Atlanta, where her aunt accompanied her.

Oliver-Wickerson said she remembers the moment she found out about her other two babies, but only briefly.

“They had to give me something to sedate me so it’s kind of a blur,” she said.

Intense, devastating shock and/or grief can cause epinephrine to shoot up along with hormones causing stress to the heart, according to experts. It is not unusual for a large amount of stress to cause a heart attack.

The mother said she knew she was having a heart attack when they told her about finding A’Miyah’s body because it was not her first heart attack–she had one last year when her mother passed away from COVID and was actually already on medication at the time of her children’s untimely deaths.

“I forgot to take my meds during the whole ordeal so when I decided to take it, it was already too late,” she said.

According to her interview with Nancy Grace and Crime Online, Oliver-Wickerson was shocked to hear that her three little girls were actually strangled and had not drowned in the pond–as was previously thought. Nancy asked the mother what went through her mind when she was told about this.

“My mind kind of went left,” Oliver-Wickerson said. “When they were telling me this they had to literally stand in front of me because I was trying to get out the door. I guess they probably thought that I was going to probably hurt my cousin or something.”

Grace asked the mother if she could even believe it when she was first told the three girls were strangled, put in a pond and abandoned.

“No, I did not,” Oliver-Wickerson said. “They kept repeating it more than five times.”

When asked about the funeral, and the lacerations that have been reported on the children’s faces, the mother had some shocking revelations.

“I couldn’t really see any lacerations on Te’Mari and A’Miyah besides busted lips,” Oliver- Wickerson said. “But on my Zi’Ariel, my nine-year-old, they had to reconstruct one side of her face. It looked like she took a beating on one side of her face and it pulled her skin off. So they had to reconstruct one side of her face” The mother told Nancy Grace that she was told that the three girls did have clothes on when they were found, though two of them were missing their shoes.

“Miss Wilkerson do you believe that any of your three girls that were found in that pond had been molested,” Nancy Grace asked.

“At the time, no ma’am I didn’t,” Oliver- Wickerson said. “From the autopsy and what we were told by the Texas Rangers–Yes they were (molested). All three” Grace asked again who was there taking care of the children that night while Oliver- Wickerson was at work.

“My cousin Paris Propps,” Oliver-Wickerson said. “(he’s) a male, he lives with his mother.”

Paris Armond Propps is 31-years-old and has still not given her an account of what happened the night her girls were found dead, according to Oliver-Wickerson “He won’t even talk to me or nobody else,” Oliver-Wickerson said, adding that Propps attended her three daughters’ funerals but slept through the service.

The mother told Nancy Grace that the cops have not questioned Propps, her first-cousin.

“No, his mom told him not to talk to the police and she told (police) to stay away from him and her house,” Oliver-Wickerson said.”His mom is my aunt and my mom is his aunt.”

No one has been named as a person of interest in the case, according to authorities.

“My four-year-old has already told Texas Rangers that the girls went in the woods with Paris, but they said she’s too little,” Oliver- Wickerson said, adding that she cannot even reach the Texas Ranger placed on the case, Ranger Josh Mason.

“I’m trying to ask him if there is any news, whatever they have, can (he) speak with me, give me some details, or anything about my kids’ case but it’s like he’s just dodging my calls, my voicemails,” the mother said. “The crime victim lady (advocate) also has messaged Josh Mason to call me. He emailed her back and said that he would.”

“That was back in January and he still has not called to this day, or answered his phone,” she said.

However, Oliver-Wickerson said that the Texas Ranger did finally call her a little over a week ago.

“The only time he called (was) last week from an unknown number, asking me (if) people (have) called me since they did a press release,” she said. “Then, when I tried calling back he didn’t even answer.”

Nancy posited that the Texas Ranger is concerned about the media.

“Yes, he wants me to see if people would come to me tell me stuff and I give it back to him because (it’s) like they want me to do their investigation for them,” Oliver-Wickerson said.

Gregory Williams, Sergeant-Texas Department of Public Safety, told the Journal-Sun that future inquiries will need to be directed to the DA’s office. “The Rangers did assist in the investigation, but all information has been turned over to the Prosecutor.”

A press release stated the Cass County DA’s Office, along with the Sheriff’s Office and Texas Rangers are seeking any new information that could lead to an arrest in this case. Shelton recommends that those with information contact Texas Ranger Josh Mason at (903) 255-5727.