10-year-old girl tortured to death by dad jumped out apartment window, begged strangers to save her months earlier
A 10-year-old girl was allegedly tortured to death by her father and his girlfriend just months after she jumped out a window to escape the abuse — only to be returned by police officers.
Rebekah Baptiste, 10, was found on the side of an Arizona highway beaten and starving in July following years of vicious physical abuse and neglect.
Her father, 32-year-old Richard Baptiste, and Anicia Woods, 29, who acted as the girl’s stepmother, were later arrested and charged with her murder.
But nine months earlier, in October 2024, Rebekah, then 9, made a daring escape from her father’s second-floor Phoenix apartment and asked for help from a homeless person and a gas station employee, telling them that her stepmom abused her, according to AZ Family.
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She was taken to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where Phoenix police and the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) got involved.
She told officers that she ran away because she got in trouble after Woods thought she was pretending to sleep, according to a police report obtained by ABC 15.
Woods had made her run laps as punishment and “hit her with a brush on the back of her hand,” the girl said, revealing “faint bruising and marks on the back of both of her hands,” according to the report.
Rebekah said Woods also hit her with a belt on her feet and showed the officers red marks on both of them.
“It has happened a lot,” she told the cops, the report states.
Police interviewed Woods, who denied hitting Rebekah and claimed the girl was harming herself with a brush the night before.
The DCS investigator told police they had multiple reports of Rebekah self-harming and accusing Woods of abuse — but due to the conflicting stories and lack of witnesses, authorities determined the October 2024 incident did not rise to the level of criminal prosecution, and the case was closed a month later.
A DCS report from this October confirmed that it was one of at least 12 reports over the years raising concerns about the girl’s safety.
In early July 2025, the family moved from Phoenix to a yurt in a remote part of Apache County, according to ABC 15.
Rebekah was found unresponsive, horrifically beaten, sexually abused and malnourished on the side of a highway in Holbrook on July 27.
“She had bruises from head to toe. There were injuries to her vaginal and anus area. She had damaged, missing toenails and burn marks on her back that appeared to be consistent with cigarette burns,” Kole Soderquist, a deputy with the Apache County Sheriff’s Office, testified in September.
She died in the hospital from non-accidental trauma three days later, DCS said. One doctor said she was “tortured,” according to AZ Family.
Police searched the family’s home and discovered a horror scene.
“There were lots of paper towels with blood all over them in a trash can where we found clumps of hair,” Soderquist said.
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Police said Baptiste and Woods admitted to physically disciplining the girl when she got in trouble.
The pair were arrested and each charged with first-degree murder, aggravated assault, child abuse, and kidnapping.
Damon Hawkins, Rebekah’s uncle, told AZ Family he partially blames a broken system for his niece’s brutal murder. Hawkins says he and his wife alerted DCS after they started to notice red flags.
He claimed that on multiple occasions, he tried to see Rebekah and her two younger brothers, but was always turned away.
“I made it clear to the investigator and DCS that the system failed her,” he told the outlet. “We have logs and logs of the times where, over the past years, they’ve been contacted, of the worry that we had.”
The accused couple is due back in court in January and is scheduled for trial in June.
Cop Helps Save Teen Girl After She Went Missing — Now Years Later, They’re Getting Married
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When I was a kid and moved to a new neighborhood in Philadelphia, I became friendly with a neighbor about my age. She attended an all-girls Catholic school and was going to a play there, and she asked if I wanted to tag along — so I did. The play was very High School Musical-esque, filled with kids from our area I had never met before. Nothing miraculous happened, and frankly, I didn’t think anything about that night until years later when I met my husband.
We started talking about where we grew up and what we were like in high school, and my husband told me he joined the theater group to impress his girlfriend at the time. I did stage crew at my high school, so I asked what play he was in — and he named the one my neighbor took me to three years earlier. I unknowingly watched my husband in a play and had no clue we’d marry each other a decade later.
Though a far more harrowing tale, Roshin Ali was unknowingly in her soon-to-be husband’s orbit as a teen too. Ali ran away from her home in Jackson, Tennessee, to escape her abusive father at just 13 years old. In a truly disturbing story, Ali detailed that her alcoholic and gambling-addicted father often took out his casino losses on his family with physical and emotional abuse. He did not let his children outside the house, an exclusive New York Post interview detailed, and when he came home from losing all their money and found them playing outdoors, he threatened to kill Ali and her siblings.
“We immediately ran into our bedroom because we were afraid that he was going to start beating on us like he normally does whenever he comes home upset,” Ali explained on TikTok. Her sister barricaded the door with her body.
https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7523410950410587422?lang=vi-VN&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Flittlethings.com%2Ffamily-and-parenting%2Fcop-engaged-runaway-teen-backstory
The father grabbed a knife and began stabbing the door, got in, grabbed Ali’s sister, and dragged her off to beat her with a cable wire.
“We can literally hear her begging him not to kill her. He duct taped her hands together, her legs together, and then placed duct tape on her mouth so nobody could hear her screaming,” she shared with the Post.
“Then my mom walks into our room and she looks at us, and she goes, ‘Y’all are next.’”
Ali and her brother escaped through their bedroom window and ran to the nearest park while their father called the cops and reported her missing.
When the authorities found her, Ali explained what happened, and she and her three siblings were placed in foster care.
“I truly believe if it was not me running away from the house that day and officers being involved, I don’t think that we’d still be here alive,” she told the newspaper.
Roughly 12 years later, grown-up Ali got a job at the sheriff’s department and caught the attention of Tyler Schrupp, who couldn’t stop staring at her. Eventually, the two started talking and began sharing stories about their lives.https://www.instagram.com/p/DPZyLirAMOP/embed/?cr=1&v=14&wp=540&rd=https%3A%2F%2Flittlethings.com&rp=%2Ffamily-and-parenting%2Fcop-engaged-runaway-teen-backstory#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A1114.6999999284744%2C%22ls%22%3A508.5%2C%22le%22%3A1110.3999999761581%7D
“We started putting the dates together and then she described the area,” Schrupp told the Post.
“That’s when I started to be like, ‘Okay, I was a part of that. It’s crazy that back then I was looking for you, and now we’re sitting here talking,’” he said.
The backlash online from people was more intense than she anticipated when she shared a “jokey” trend video of how she met her now fiancé, with some accusing him of “grooming” her.
https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7522682086961024286?lang=vi-VN&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Flittlethings.com%2Ffamily-and-parenting%2Fcop-engaged-runaway-teen-backstory
But truthfully, the two didn’t meet until years later, which led Ali to set the record straight with her story.
The two got engaged in August 2024 and have a 5-month-old son together. They are slated to get married in 2026.
