The Caddo Parish D.A. recently told a reporter, “I think we need to kill more people.” Illustration by Oliver Munday

A week after his son turned one, Rodricus Crawford woke up a few minutes before 7 A.M. on the left side of his bed. His son was sleeping on the right side, facing the door. Crawford, who was twenty-three, reached over to wake him up, but the baby didn’t move. He put his ear on his son’s stomach and then began yelling for his mother. “Look at the baby!” he shouted.

Crawford was lanky, with delicate features, high cheekbones, and a patchy goatee. He lived in a small three-bedroom house with his mother, grandmother, uncle, sister, and a younger brother in Mooretown, a neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, bordered by a stretch of factories and next to the airport. His mother, Abbie, a housekeeper at the Quality Inn, rushed into the room and picked up the baby, who was named Roderius, after his father. He looked as if he were asleep, but his forehead felt cool.

Crawford’s uncle called 911, and an operator instructed him to try CPR while they waited for an ambulance. Crawford’s mother and sister took turns pumping the baby’s chest.

“I’m doing it, Ma’am, but he ain’t doing nothing!” Abbie said, out of breath.

The ambulance seemed to be taking too long, so Crawford’s younger brother called 911 on another line. “The baby’s not talking, not breathing, not saying anything,” he said. “Can you get an ambulance?”

They were used to waiting a long time for city services; the alarm could go off at their pastor’s church and ring all night, and the fire department would never come. There was a saying in the neighborhood that the police were never there when you needed them, only when you didn’t. The community was populated almost entirely by black families, many of whom had grown up together. After a few more minutes, Crawford’s brother called 911 again. “We need an ambulance, Ma’am,” he said. “It’s been twenty minutes!”

Not long afterward, another 911 operator called a dispatcher and asked what was happening at the address. “They probably slept on the damn baby,” the dispatcher said. “There’s a hundred folks in that damn house.”

When the ambulance arrived, moments later, Crawford ran out of the house with the baby in his arms. The paramedics put a breathing mask over Roderius’s face, and Crawford thought he saw his son’s eyes open. He tried to climb into the back of the ambulance, but the paramedics shut the doors and told him to stay outside. They couldn’t find a pulse. Roderius’s jaw was stiff and his eyes were milky, a sign that he had been dead for more than an hour. They decided to wait in the ambulance until the police arrived before telling the family.

Meanwhile, the baby’s mother, Lakendra Lott, and her family had arrived. They lived on the same street, five houses away. Lott and Crawford had known each other since they were children and had been close since middle school. He was hyper, affectionate, and fondly known as a clown. She was quiet and withdrawn; she had “been to the tenth floor,” a phrase used in the neighborhood to describe the psychiatric ward of the closest hospital. There had been rumors that someone else might be Roderius’s father—Crawford and Lott both had daughters from other relationships—but when Crawford held Roderius at the hospital he was sure that the newborn was his. The baby usually slept at Lott’s house, but Crawford visited him almost every day. He was a gifted dancer—in high school he had been in the marching band and started a dance troupe called the Black Boys—and he liked to entertain the baby by setting his feet on the floor and making him dance like a marionette.

The families began knocking on the windows of the ambulance, asking the driver why he hadn’t left for the hospital. The paramedics reported to their dispatcher that they were surrounded by a mob; they worried that there was going to be some sort of riot. “If the crowd gets bad, we don’t have anything—there’s no protection,” one paramedic said later. “We had to leave for our safety.” The ambulance drove away with its sirens and lights on, but switched them off as soon as it turned the corner.

The police arrived at the Crawfords’ house shortly after. Crawford was with his cousins, who lived across the street. When an officer asked for him, his mother admitted that he was afraid of the police, because “he’s got a little charge going on, and he’s worried about that.” He had an open warrant for marijuana possession. In the past, he’d been arrested for battery, after fights with girlfriends, and for minor infractions, like driving with his headlights off and not wearing a seat belt. Crawford came home a few seconds later and tried to hug his mother, who was standing at the foot of their driveway, but the officer told him to sit in the police car. He slid into the back seat, held his head in his hands, and began rocking back and forth and crying.

After a few minutes, he looked out the back window and saw Lott, who seemed disoriented. He motioned her over, and as soon as she opened the car door he wrapped his arms around her and buried his head in the back of her neck. When she told him that she knew the baby must have died, even though the cops wouldn’t answer the family’s questions, he pulled away. “What is wrong with you?” he said. “Don’t do that to me. He’s all right.”

The police wouldn’t let Lott or Crawford go to the hospital. Instead, they drove them to the police station. An officer asked Crawford why the baby had bruises on his head and his lip, and Crawford explained that the day before the baby had been standing on the bathroom floor when he slipped and fell between the toilet and the bathtub, hitting his head and cutting his lip. “I gave him an ice cube and put it in his mouth and wiped the blood off his lip, and he was straight,” Crawford said.

When detectives interviewed Lott, she was reticent and leaden. In emotional situations, she was known to retreat by staring at her phone.

“Have you ever seen him lose his cool?” they asked her, referring to Crawford.

“No, sir,” she said. “Until today.”

“What happened today?”

“He was just upset,” she said.

She told the officers that Roderius “had a little cold,” so she’d stopped by Crawford’s house the day before to drop off a nasal aspirator. While she was there, Crawford had told her about the baby’s fall, and she’d looked at his injuries. “There was a bruise right there,” she said, pointing above her right eye. “And his mouth—he had bust his lip. But he was still happy and everything.”

That morning, a forensic pathologist performed an autopsy and determined that the bruises on Roderius’s lips were the marks of smothering. Later, when he reviewed slides of Roderius’s lung tissue, he discovered that the baby also had pneumonia, but he decided that the illness was a coincidence.

The detectives interviewed Crawford for the second time that day, and told him that the pathologist had found bruises on the baby’s bottom, indicating that he had suffered from “chronic child abuse.”