Tekquan Alexander (Ventura County District Attorney’s Office)
A California man arrested three years ago for brutally beating his 4-year-old daughter was found guilty on Tuesday of torture, assault, and corporal injury to a child.
Tekquan Alexander, an aspiring rapper, was arrested in November 2021 after he repeatedly and violently abused his young daughter. After sustaining days of abuse at the hands of her father, the girl was unresponsive and airlifted to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. She was diagnosed with “traumatic injuries to her brain and spine, as well as broken bones and dozens of cuts and bruises,” according to local news outlet KTLA. The “catastrophic” injuries left her in a “vegetative state,” according to the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office.
In a statement after the verdict, Deputy District Attorney Rikole Kelly said that Alexander’s daughter “faces a future filled with unimaginable challenges due to the defendant’s reprehensible conduct, but today’s verdict holds him accountable and brings a measure of justice to her and to all those profoundly affected by this case.”
The young girl’s mother, Keyonna Watts, spoke to The Shade Room about the case in 2022. She and Alexander were living on separate coasts at the time of their daughter’s hospitalization; she was in Atlanta, Georgia, while Alexander left for Los Angeles to pursue a rap career. Watts told TSR that it was a detective who told her that her daughter was “bleeding from the brain.” In a FaceTime call with Alexander, he told her she had “passed out standing in time-out.”
TSR obtained records from the girl’s emergency room visit that said part of her skull was removed to alleviate the pressure from the bleeding.
Court documents described how Alexander explained that his daughter was a “bed-wetter,” and that he would “[punish] her by making her do rigorous exercises with an element of physical abuse, including but not limited to hitting with boxing gloves, hitting her with a belt, and hitting her with speaker wire.”
Alexander is set to be sentenced on Dec. 12. He faces a maximum sentence of seven years to life.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
