Mother charged in stabbing death of 4-year-old daughter in northwest Harris Co.

FILE - A mugshot of Laquita Lewis on June 18, 2017. Lewis is accused of stabbing and killing her 4-year-old daughter at a northwest Harris County apartment complex. FILE - A mugshot of Laquita Lewis on June 18, 2017. Lewis is accused of stabbing and killing her 4-year-old daughter at a northwest Harris County apartment complex. Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Mother charged in stabbing death of 4-year-old daughter in northwest Harris Co. 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

When Laquita Lewis waved a knife at her 16-year-old son and threatened to murder him, she got off with a slap on the wrist: 15 months of probation.

But now — less than a year later — the Houston mother of four stands accused of brutally stabbing her 4-year-old to death inside a northwest Harris County apartment, leaving the toddler in a pool of blood.

This time she might not get off so easy. On Monday, the Harris County District Attorney's Office announced its intent to pursue a capital murder charge in the grisly case.

The sordid tale unfolded Sunday night after Lewis called the child's father and admitted to the killing, according to prosecutors.

"She's in heaven," Lewis reportedly said.

The worried father called police, who arrived at Lewis's apartment in the 5600 block of Timber Creek only to find the girl's lifeless body. She appeared to have been stabbed repeatedly in the chest.

"Our heart goes out to a four-year-old girl named Fredricka Allen, her father, siblings and other family members," Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said Monday in a statement.

"The unnatural act of a mother killing her own child is among the toughest for society to comprehend."

Before her knife-brandishing 2016 arrest, Lewis had no prior criminal record, though she'd landed in court repeatedly with a string of family court cases. The first was filed in 2011 by the Texas Attorney General's Office against Donnell Lewis Jr., the longtime husband who fathered three of Lewis's children - including the one she threatened to kill. After divorcing in 2012, the couple shared joint custody of their three sons, now ages 5, 15, and 16.

In 2014 and again in 2015, the attorney general filed suits against Fredricka's father, Frederick Allen. As with the earlier suit, a judge tossed the cases when Lewis failed to appear.

But Lewis never ended up in a Harris County criminal court until the 2016 case that landed her on probation.

The details of the case aren't immediately clear from court records, but somehow, a Thanksgiving day outburst ended in a misdemeanor charge for making terroristic threats.

Days after her initial arrest, Lewis was released on bond. In February, she was awarded deferred adjudication, a form of probation in which she would not have a conviction on her record if she completed the terms of probation.

Ogg's office said Lewis scored the lowest possible risk for recidivism when she was evaluated with the Texas Risk Assessment System as part of her probation requirements.

Now, she's being held in the Harris County Jail without bail. If convicted, she could face life in prison or the death penalty.

It's still not clear what sparked the slaying, authorities said.

Earlier in the day, it appears Lewis and her current boyfriend got into some sort of dispute, according to sheriff's office spokesman Thomas Gilliland. Authorities did not clarify what the fight was about, and it was not clear whether that boyfriend was the girl's father.

But the dispute may have contributed to Lewis's fatal outburst, Gilliland said.

After the slaying, Lewis abandoned the toddler and drove away, prosecutors said. Then around 6 p.m., she got into a minor car crash at Interstate 10 and Loop 610, to which the Houston Police Department responded.

Lewis wound up in Memorial Hermann Hospital that evening.

Prosecutors said in court Monday that she told the child's father and aunt about the killing first via text messages and then by phone calls.

Lewis did not appear in court Monday because she was still being processed into the Harris County jail. She is expected to go before state District Judge Maria Jackson on Tuesday, where she will be formally arraigned and an attorney will likely be appointed.

Although her case sent shock waves across the city, it offers eerie echoes of another Houston-area crime that narrowly avoided a similarly tragic ending.

In 2015, Jenea Mungia stabbed her 4-year-old son on the front lawn of the family's home. The boy survived, but Mungia was hit with the felony charge of serious bodily injury to a child.

Afterward, an attorney for the distraught mother said she was having "very delusional thoughts and hallucinations" at the time of the assault.

And, like other troubled Texas mothers before her - including Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in 2001, and Dena Schlosser. who killed her 10-month-old daughter with a butcher knife in 2004 - Mungia was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity.

On Monday, with Lewis still sitting behind bars, her apartment sat shrouded in silence, with tricycles and toys littered across the sleepy patio.

One neighbor said she had no idea there'd been a murder next door.

"It's usually really quiet around here," Jessica Rivera said from the doorway of her second-floor apartment.

Blake Paterson contributed to this report.