In 2018, Paula Bryant had moved with her five children — including a teenage son from a previous relationship — into a house in West Columbus, where, she said in an interview, the landlords did not mind her credit problems. Mr. Hammonds, Ma’Khia’s father, did not live with the family and Ms. Bryant described herself as raising the children largely on her own.
The Hilltop neighborhood once housed blue-collar workers for a General Motors plant, but the plant was shuttered years ago, and many of the bungalows have been converted into cheap rentals. It has one of the highest crime rates in the city.
Andrea Douglass, 37, a pastor’s wife who lived two doors down from the Bryant family that year, has gotten used to turbulence. When shootings occur on her block, she said, “it’s a big hubbub for a day or two and then life just moves on.” But, three years later, she can still remember the fights between Ms. Bryant and her daughters.
“The girls ran out of the house terrified, and were hanging out in the backyard screaming while the mom was yelling at them,” Ms. Douglass said, recalling that she was worried about their safety. “I never want kids to be afraid. When kids are afraid, that is a problem.”
The family had been on the radar of Children Services for several years, amid repeated complaints that the two youngest children were absent from school. In February 2017, Ms. Bryant took Ma’Khia, Ja’Niah and two younger siblings to one of the agency’s offices and said “she was at her wits end” and could no longer handle them, according to a Children Services document outlining the case. The children, Ms. Bryant told the agency, had “no respect” for those around them.
The move to Hilltop had been difficult for her daughters, who missed their friends on the East Side, Ms. Bryant said. “They were kind of rebelling in the home,” she said. The police came, she said, when she was arguing with Ma’Khia and Ja’Niah over bedtimes, and their younger sister, Azariah, ran outside and yelled for help.
“The officers said, you have just lost control as a parent, meaning, you can tell them to go to bed, go upstairs right now, and they’re not going to go,” she said. The children told police officers that they had suffered physical abuse from their mother and an older half brother, according to the mother’s lawyer, Michelle Martin, though Ms. Bryant denied ever abusing them. A magistrate judge dismissed the abuse claims against Ms. Bryant in February 2019 but found that she had neglected the children, according to court documents.