15 years after infant’s death, Beaufort police charge father with homicide by child abuse
Beaufort investigators have unearthed a 15-year-old cold case to charge a St. Helena father with killing his infant child in 2009. Little is known about the accusations brought forward in the child’s death, whose initial investigation prompted no arrests.
Antwain Jonathan Doe, 41, was charged Thursday morning with homicide by child abuse. As of 2 p.m. Thursday, he was in custody at the Beaufort County Detention Center awaiting a bond hearing.
The child, who Beaufort police spokesperson Chief Stephenie Price estimated was five to six months old, died the morning of May 10, 2009. Officers arrived to the Spanish Trace Apartments around 1:06 a.m. after a 911 caller said the baby was not breathing. County EMS teams attempted life-saving measures before taking the infant to a local hospital, where the child was pronounced dead.
A press release from the Beaufort Police Department says “investigators were assigned to conduct a renewed examination” of the infant’s death in December 2023. Upon taking a second look at the case file and re-interviewing witnesses, police sought an arrest warrant for Doe.
Although Doe had no criminal charges within the last decade, judicial records show a small string of convictions in the period following his child’s death. He was arrested for simple assault on May 23, 2009, just two weeks after the incident, and was found guilty in court the next year. He pleaded guilty to trespassing in 2010 and fleeing from police in 2011.
Price would not answer further questions about details of the alleged homicide or why investigators were reassigned to the case. Beaufort County Coroner David Ott said Thursday afternoon that his office did not have immediate access to archived records of the child’s death.
Beaufort County deputies and the S.C. Law Enforcement Division’s Fugitive Task Force assisted in the arrest Thursday morning, according to sheriff’s office spokesperson Maj. Angela Viens.
Homicide by child abuse is a felony punishable by 20 years to life in prison. The charge can only be applied when the victim is younger than 11 years old — a peculiarity in state law that has invoked scrutiny from officials, including 14th Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone.
Stone, whose judicial circuit includes Beaufort and Jasper counties, has argued to state lawmakers that the current maximum age for victims makes it unnecessarily difficult to hold child abusers accountable, like in the 2023 trial for the murder of Cristina Pangalangan, an 11-year-old with cerebral palsy who died after being left in a hot car in Colleton County. Prosecutors were forced to try the girl’s caretakers for murder, a more complicated charge that’s harder to prove to a jury.
The solicitor publicly supported a bill that would include all victims under 18 in the statute, which passed in the S.C. Senate but remains in committee in the House as of Thursday.
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