Assistant state’s attorney Marie Taraska: Anthony, I talked to you earlier, and you told me about the death of Semaj Rice. . . . In the last week or two, on several occasions you struck Semaj Rice while disciplining him. A few days ago you saw Semaj sticking his hand in his diaper and you felt he needed to be disciplined, so you struck him several times in his legs and back. . . . Is that correct?
Semaj Rice died on March 14, 2002, when he was 19 months old. The people entrusted with his care, 17-year-old Anthony Wilson and 16-year-old Vanessa (not her real name), were wards of the state who’d run away from their group home two months earlier.
The couple moved in with Vanessa’s 50-year-old grandmother, Thomasa Brown. She lived in Cabrini-Green in a four-bedroom apartment in a 16-floor building at 534 W. Division. It was there that Anthony first met Semaj, Vanessa’s toddler brother. A couple of Brown’s daughters lived there as well, along with their boyfriends. Another daughter, Natalia, the mother of Vanessa and Semaj, also stayed in the apartment, but only sporadically. “She’d leave, don’t come back,” Anthony says. “Go out, do her thing–do drugs.”
According to Anthony, after he and Vanessa moved in, Brown quickly delegated Semaj’s care to them. Brown denies this, though she allows that she sometimes asked the two teens to watch him during the day and she had him sleep with Vanessa at night instead of with her. Brown says that one night Vanessa and Semaj were sleeping in a top bunk in one of the bedrooms when Semaj rolled over Vanessa and “fell out the bed.” She says she’d put pillows on the floor “because this concrete don’t give” and that one of them broke his fall, so that he had only a swollen lip.
Anthony Wilson: Yes.
Anthony told Taraska that one afternoon he and Vanessa were in the bathroom of the 1230 apartment “busting little bumps in our face”–squeezing pimples, he explained. Semaj “was standing by the sink with us, then he just wandered off by the toilet. It was some bread in the toilet. . . . Then I turned around, seen him trying to eat the bread out the toilet, and I stopped–and I popped–and I whupped him.”
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Anthony had been born to an 18-year-old high school dropout named Veronica, who in the late 80s began smoking crack. He was her fourth child. Their father did little to help raise them.
