A 10-year-old girl was allegedly tortured to death by her father and his girlfriend just months after she jumped out of a window to escape the abuse — only to be returned by police officers.
Rebekah Baptiste, 10, was found on the side of an Arizona highway beaten and starving in July following years of vicious physical abuse and neglect.
Her father, 32-year-old Richard Baptiste, and Anicia Woods, 29, who acted as the girl’s stepmother, were later arrested and charged with her murder.
But nine months earlier in Oct. 2024, Rebekah, then 9, made a daring escape from her father’s second-floor Phoenix apartment and asked for help from a homeless person and a gas station employee, telling them that her stepmom abused her, according to AZ Family.
She was taken to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where Phoenix police and the Arizona Department of Child Safety [DCS] got involved.
She told officers that she ran away because she got in trouble after Woods thought she was pretending to sleep, according to a police report obtained by ABC 15.
Woods had made her run laps as punishment and “hit her with a brush on the back of her hand,” the girl said, revealing “faint bruising and marks on the back of both of her hands,” according to the report.
Rebekah said Woods also hit her with a belt on her feet and showed the officers red marks on both of them.
“It has happened a lot,” she told the cops, the report states.
Police interviewed Woods, who denied hitting Rebekah and claimed the girl was harming herself with a brush the night before.
The DCS investigator told police they had multiple reports of Rebekah self-harming and accusing Woods of abuse — but due to the conflicting stories and lack of witnesses, authorities determined the October 2024 incident did not rise to the level of criminal prosecution, and the case closed a month later.
A DCS report from this October confirmed that it was one of at least 12 reports over the years raising concerns about the girl’s safety.
In early July 2025, the family moved from Phoenix to a yurt in a remote part of Apache County, according to ABC 15.
Rebekah was found unresponsive, horrifically beaten, sexually abused and malnourished on the side of a highway in Holbrook on July 27.
“She had bruises from head to toe. There were injuries to her vaginal and anus area. She had damaged, missing toenails and burn marks on her back that appeared to be consistent with cigarette burns,” Kole Soderquist, a deputy with the Apache County Sheriff’s Office, testified in September.
She died in the hospital from non-accidental trauma three days later, DCS said. One doctor said she was “tortured,” according to AZ Family.
Police searched the family’s home and discovered a horror scene.
“There were lots of paper towels with blood all over them in a trash can where we found clumps of hair,” Soderquist said.
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Police said Baptiste and Woods admitted to physically disciplining the girl when she got in trouble.
The pair were arrested and each charged with first-degree murder, aggravated assault, child abuse, and kidnapping.
Damon Hawkins, Rebekah’s uncle, told AZ Family he partially blames a broken system for his niece’s brutal murder. Hawkins says he and his wife alerted DCS after they started to notice red flags.
He claimed that on multiple occasions, he tried to see Rebekah and her two younger brothers, but was always turned away.
“I made it clear to the investigator and DCS that the system failed her,” he told the outlet. “We have logs and logs of the times where, over the past years, they’ve been contacted, of the worry that we had.”
The couple is due back in court in January and is scheduled for trial in June.
