FORT PIERCE, Fla. (WFLA) — The St. Lucie Sheriff’s Office found a six-year-old dead in his bedroom, and his mother told him “Let’s drive the devil away.”
The school’s resource agent requested a welfare check on boy Lamil Pierre on Friday after going missing from school for two weeks.
That morning, the aide went to the house at Fort Pierce and met the boy’s mother, 31-year-old Ronda Ponis.
St. Lucie County Sheriff Richard Del Toro said the cause of the child’s death was not immediately clear and an autopsy is scheduled for Saturday.
While interviewing Ponis, detectives learned on May 18th that she had last told the child. He had been missing from school since May 14th.
Deputies were at home due to medical issues their mother had just one day before believing that the boy was killed on May 17th.
“What we learned when we spoke to our mothers is that she believes that God tells her to legally drive demons out of the child’s body,” Sheriff Del Toro said.
She is charged with second-degree murder, failure to report death, and physical alterations.
Del Toro told investigators that when the child stopped moving, she believed he had been freed from the devil and she was waiting for him to “come back.”
At the time, no one lived in the house.
“From what I understand, this kid was just lit up the room and everyone loved him,” the sheriff said.
