Davontae Marcel Williams (June 13, 1995 – July 26, 2004) was a nine-year-old boy who died of malnutrition at his apartment in Arlington, Texas.

To support the charges of capital murder against both women, prosecutors cited kidnapping as an aggravating circumstance.

When Coleman appealed her death sentence, her attorneys argued that no kidnapping had occurred because Davontae had been in his own home and had been seen walking around his apartment complex days before he died.

Some of those investigations stemmed from accusations of neglect, and Davontae and his sister had been removed from the home for a year in 1999 because of physical abuse allegations against Coleman.

When CPS investigated, Davontae had thinning hair, bruises on his back, and swelling on his lip and his penis.

[10] Around that time, Coleman and Marcella Williams began hiding Davontae, failing to send him to school or to take him to doctors.

[10] On July 26, 2004, Marcella Williams called 9-1-1 and told a dispatcher that Davontae had stopped breathing at their home in Arlington, Texas.

[5] When the dispatcher attempted to provide Marcella Williams with instructions for performing CPR, the call disconnected.

[12] When emergency medical personnel arrived, Coleman told them that Davontae had stopped breathing a few minutes earlier.

[13] Coleman and Marcella Williams were both arrested, charged with injury to a child, and held in jail in Arlington on $200,000 bond.

[10] The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office said that malnutrition caused Davontae's death; they said that pneumonia also contributed to his demise.

[6][nb 1] Citing evidence that Davontae had been bound and locked in a pantry, prosecutors advanced kidnapping as the aggravating circumstance in Coleman's case.

[3] A psychological associate who had evaluated Davontae in 1999 said that he had developmental delays which included speech problems, and that he needed to have grown up in a stable environment to develop properly.

[14] In the punishment phase of the trial, Coleman's attorneys raised several potential mitigating circumstances in an attempt to spare Coleman a death sentence, including the illicit nature of her conception, her early exposure to alcohol and drugs, and the abuse that caused her to end up in foster care.

She also received assistance from Brad Levenson, the lead attorney at the Office of Capital Writs (OCW), the agency responsible for representing Texas death row inmates during their appeals.

[3] In subsequent motions, Stickels argued that the capital murder charge was inappropriate, saying that Davontae could not have been kidnapped in his own home.

Levenson said that Coleman's original attorneys had failed to investigate evidence that would have disproven the kidnapping allegation, such as the claims of neighbors that Davontae had appeared happy and unrestrained at functions within his apartment complex in the days before he died.

After the deaths of Davontae and several other children in Texas, the governor's office opened an inquiry into CPS child maltreatment investigations.

In 2005, a Texas Senate bill sponsored by Jane Nelson gave $200 million to CPS to hire and train additional staff members.