A Dallas County jury on Monday found a 36-year-old man guilty of capital murder in the beating death of his girlfriend's young daughter in Grand Prairie.
Charles Phifer was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the killing of four-year-old Leiliana Wright.
Leiliana's mother, Jeri Quezada, pleaded guilty to felony injury to a child in the case and will be sentenced to 50 years in prison, according to a news release from the Dallas County district attorney's office.
Phifer and Quezada were accused of beating Leiliana in the days and hours before she died on March 12, 2016 of blunt force trauma to her head and abdomen. Phifer – who in a jailhouse interview with WFAA in 2016 blamed Leiliana's death on her mother – also bound Leiliana's hands with electrical wire and tied her to a rod in a closet, the news release said.
An arrest warrant said Quezada and Phifer began beating Leiliana with a belt and a bamboo stick because they found her drinking her brother's juice. After leaving the girl alone with her boyfriend, Quezada received a call from Phifer, who said he tied up Leiliana for about 10 minutes because she was "making herself throw up," the arrest warrant said.
Phifer later forced Pedialyte into Leiliana's mouth, according to the warrant, and shoved her into a wall while holding her by the throat.
Photos displayed at trial showed "a broken and battered little girl's body that was bruised from head to toe," the district attorney's office news release said.
Quezada and Phifer admitted to being drug addicts shooting up heroin before Leiliana died, according to prosecutors.
"This is not a story about drugs," assistant district attorney Eren Price said in a statement Monday. "This is a story about a little girl who didn't deserve this. She was an innocent victim."
Leiliana's death in 2016 was the flashpoint for exposing an understaffed, overworked Child Protective Services staff with unmanageable caseloads for child investigators in the Dallas County office.
In Wright's case, the CPS investigator assigned to make a home visit to check on the 4-year old never followed through.
In the wake of her death, two CPS employees were fired, and another resigned.
In the ensuing 16 months, CPS said it increased the number of investigators in Dallas County from 114 in April 2016 to 213 in April 2017. During the same time the average number of cases an investigators is handling at once had dropped from 28 to 11.