A 2-year-old girl whose mother was killed in a South Florida crash just weeks after the girl was born in 2016 was found murdered in Texas allegedly at the hands of her father.
Yovahnis Roque, 26, was arraigned Wednesday on a capital murder charge in the killing of his daughter in Orange, Texas, police Capt. Robert Enmon said.
Roque was arrested Tuesday after the discovery of his slain daughter in their home. Enmon says she was killed in her bedroom with a hammer.
Officers found Roque "completely covered in blood" and discovered the girl's body in a closet, an arrest affidavit said.
Enmon said it was the most horrific crime he's dealt with in his 29-year career, calling it "the crime scene of nightmares."
Roque remained jailed Wednesday on $2 million bond. Jail records didn't list an attorney for him. Orange is on the Texas-Louisiana border about 30 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.
In court Wednesday, a judge was explaining the capital murder charge when Roque exclaimed: "The government made me do it."
Enmon said Thursday that authorities investigated a disturbance at the house several months earlier, but that the call didn't appear to involve the child.
A friend of the suspect, Abner Santiago, told the Beaumont Enterprise that he received a series of messages from Roque on Tuesday, including one in which he told his friend to start digging because there was going to be "an all-out war."
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"He was messaging me weird coded messages about the world ending," Santiago said. "He wasn't like this before when I knew him back in Miami."
The girl's mother, 24-year-old Rachel Foster, was killed in a June 19, 2016 crash in Miami-Dade. Roque, who was Foster's boyfriend at the time, was driving when his car broke down on the side of the Palmetto Expressway by Northwest 57th Avenue, and Foster had gone to help him.
Investigators said Foster got out to go to Roque's car when she was hit by another vehicle and killed at the scene. Roque, who was also struck, was badly injured.
Foster's mother, Delia Foster, said the death of her daughter, and now the killing of her granddaughter, brings "a complete emptiness. And it's just so gloomy and so devastating."
