Hours after Christmas Day dinner at her sister's Third Ward apartment, Mona Yvette Nelson, a nomadic 44-year-old maintenance worker, was jolted by a TV news report detailing the disappearance of 12-year-old Jonathan Foster from a ramshackle Garden Oaks enclave.
"I know those people," she reportedly told her sister, Angie Johnson, 62, after watching Jonathan's mother, Angela Davis, plead for help in finding her son.
Four days later, Nelson found herself in a Harris County jail cell, charged in the boy's slaying as veteran homicide detectives with uncharacteristic candor painted her a monster.
"She is a cold, soulless murderer who showed an absolute lack of remorse in taking the life of Jonathan Foster," said Michael Miller, the lead homicide detective on the case for the Houston Police Department.
With that, the evil that had visited the impoverished pocket of Garden Oaks on Christmas Eve had a face, and a nickname that went viral on the Internet: "Mona the Monster."
Since her arrest, a much more nuanced picture of Nelson — the daughter of a retired schoolteacher and deceased mortician - has emerged. There are hints of the alleged monster. Her Face*book page described an affinity for the movie Saw. Her boxing nickname was "Iron Fist." But those details are troubling only when taken in the context of Jonathan's grisly death.
Nelson's family, her defenders, paint her as a patsy who dumped what she thought was a bag of trash at someone else's request. She's a mother, a grandmother of five. Doing this, to a boy the age of one her own grand*babies?
No way, they say.
[...]
Interviews with family and friends who saw her in the days after the boy disappeared say Nelson was not nervous.
She was, though, worried about money.
"I asked if she was coming home (for Christmas)," said Preston, Nelson's 79-year-old mother. "She said, 'I don't know. I'm trying to save up money to buy something for my truck.' "
[...]
On Dec. 14, some 10 days before Jonathan disappeared, Davis and her son moved out of the Villa Nueva apartment complex on Oak Street where they had shared a home with David Davis, her husband and Jonathan's stepfather.
Davis said her husband had hit the boy. With Jonathan in tow, she moved to a dumpy duplex next door with her friend Sharon Ennamorato, whom Jonathan called "Aunt Sharon."
[...]
Angela Davis says she never met Nelson until she showed up at the duplex about 7 p.m. Christmas Eve - an hour or so after she was captured on video dumping the body. Nelson reportedly offered to look for Jonathan, saying she had stopped by earlier in the day, before he disappeared, looking for Ennamorato. She said he answered the door shirtless, and she suspected someone else was in the house.
[...]
Maintenance worker Frank Nickles, 47, said on Christmas Eve he was hanging out with Nelson, drinking beer outside his Tiffany Oaks apartment from about 10:30 a.m to 2:30 p.m. - and she didn't leave during that time. But that conflicts with what witnesses told police.
Except for Nelson, "everyone else in the case is accounted for," said HPD's Miller.
Early reports cast suspicion on Jonathan's stepfather, but he is captured on security video at a nearby bar, the Catty Corner Ice House on Wakefield. "His time is accounted for," Miller said.
At the time of Nelson's arrest, Quanell X, an advocate for people accused of crimes, asserted that Nelson was innocent of the crime, and a drug debt was at the heart of the boy's disappearance and killing.
Miller scoffed at the suggestion: "We don't have any evidence of that at all. I've never had a case where an individual who owed up money had their child killed. That's a fantasy."
Police said a "wealth of evidence" shows Jonathan was burned at Nelson's apartment.
They reported finding burned carpet and twine like the kind used to tie Jonathan's hands at Nelson's apartment, along with welding equipment they believe she used to burn the body postmortem.
A skilled welder, Nelson owned torches, but nothing inside her apartment was burned, her landlord, Gary Arnold said, noting that it had tile floors.
On whether Nelson has given them the name of an accomplice, Spence added, "We're not saying."
The day after she interred her son's ashes, Davis called Jonathan's accused killer "cold."
"God will punish her," she said.
Surprisingly, Davis also offered her absolution.
"I forgive her," she said, explaining that she could afford to because Jonathan is now free from harm. "My son's safe. He's not hurting."
