3-year-old's death in hot van ruled a homicide

Raymond Pryer Jr. Raymond Pryer Jr. Photo: Courtesy Of The Pryer Family Photo: Courtesy Of The Pryer Family Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close 3-year-old's death in hot van ruled a homicide 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

Forensic analysts have ruled the death of a 3-year-old boy a homicide more than three months after he died trapped in a sweltering van outside his northwest Houston day care.

The child, Raymond Pryer Jr., was found by his father in the vehicle on July 19 as temperatures neared 113 degrees outside the Discovering Me Academy in the 8000 block of Antoine Drive.

The boy spent more than four hours in the broiling van after returning from a field trip at a nearby park with 30 other children.

The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences has since ruled Raymond’s death a homicide.

Raymond Pryer Sr., who has lodged a $1 million lawsuit against the day care, said Thursday he was not surprised by the homicide ruling.

“People should just take full responsibility for what they did. Everyone involved should be prosecuted,” Pryer said.

After the ruling, Houston police spokesman Victor Senties said the investigation into the child’s death would continue. Dane Schiller, a spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office said their child fatality team “anticipates presenting this tragedy to a grand jury in (the) coming months.”

In September, the state Health & Human Services Commission revoked the day care’s operational permit for the northwest Houston location.

In the lawsuit, Pryer Sr. and his wife, Dikeisha Whitlock-Pryer, accused the Discovering Me Academy of negligence in the death of their son, who they called RJ. Whitlock-Pryer detailed the moments leading up to the harrowing find of her only son on “The RJ Foundation 4 Kids” website bringing awareness to hot car deaths.

When Pryer Sr. came to pick up his son and couldn’t find him, employees at the Discovering Me Academy told him that the boy “had been picked up by someone else,” she wrote.

“After receiving the first phone call from my husband, I started to make my way over to the daycare and that’s when I saw the ambulance rushing towards RJ’s day care,” Whitlock-Pryer recalled on the website. “The next phone call I received from my husband truly made my heart break. I could hear Raymond on the other end of the phone saying, ‘what did y’all do to my child?! Baby they’re trying to bring him back to life.’”

The boy’s body was hot to the touch, she said.

“We just don’t want this to happen to any other kid,” Pryer said Thursday. “We’re just doing our best to fight for him and just trying to stay strong. It’s still hard.”

Staff writer Julian Gill contributed to this report.