HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Lisa Anne Coleman was pronounced dead at 6:24 p.m. Thursday after receiving a lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit, ending an eight-year journey from a cramped Arlington apartment where investigators found the emaciated body of a 9-year-old boy to the Texas death chamber, where she offered a calm smile and whispered words of love to the witnesses who watched her die.
The 38-year-old had spent nearly a decade on death row for the capital murder of Devonte Marcel Williams, a special-needs child who weighed just 35 pounds when paramedics arrived at the family’s apartment on July 26, 2004. He was so frail that his body resembled that of a toddler, not a child on the cusp of his tenth birthday. The medical examiner would later rule his death a homicide caused by severe malnutrition, with pneumonia listed as a secondary factor.
His system had simply shut down, unable to process even the nutritional supplement drinks his mother and her partner claimed they had been giving him.
The scene that greeted first responders that sweltering July afternoon has haunted investigators for years. Devonte lay lifeless on the bathroom floor, clad only in a disposable diaper that hung loosely on his skeletal frame. Dirty peeling bandages covered wounds on his arms.
Dried yellow vomit crusted around his mouth and nose. Rigor mortis had already set in, a detail that would prove critical. He had been dead for hours before Marcela Williams made that frantic 911 call, before she claimed her son had just stopped breathing, before Lisa Coleman told paramedics the boy had only become ill minutes earlier after eating.
The lies unraveled within moments. An autopsy documented more than 250 scars across Devonte’s small body, some old and faded, others fresh and angry. Infected wounds ringed his wrists and ankles, marking where plastic extension cords had bound him.
A tear on his lip. A wound on the side of his head where his ear had once attached. In the corner of the room, investigators found a golf club stained with blood.
The question was never whether this child had suffered. The question was who had caused it, and why.
The answer pointed quickly to Coleman, then 28, who had been living in the household despite promises that she would stay away from the children. Her past told a story of generational trauma that prosecutors would later argue shaped a woman incapable of empathy. Coleman was born of rape, conceived when her mother was assaulted by her own stepfather.
From birth, she was unwanted, a living reminder of violence that her family refused to confront. She grew up in a home where physical abuse was routine, where an uncle beat her with extension cords, the very same objects that would later be used to restrain Devonte.
Child protective services intervened in her childhood, but the system failed her as it would later fail Devonte. She bounced through foster homes, some merely neglectful, others actively cruel. Her mother rarely visited, and when she did, she delivered only insults, calling the girl “Pig” until the nickname settled into her bones.
By her early teens, Coleman had been stabbed by a cousin, plied with alcohol and drugs by another relative before she hit puberty, and shuttled out of school after the tenth grade. At 15, she was already a mother herself. The following decade brought arrests for burglary and drug charges, two prison terms, and a deepening spiral of rage and survival instinct that left no room for compassion.
When detectives sat down with Coleman for questioning, she did not sugarcoat her role in Devonte’s suffering. She admitted to disciplining him with a belt, claiming she stopped not out of remorse but because the bruises were becoming too difficult to hide. She confessed that both she and Marcela had restrained the boy with cords on multiple occasions, including the night he died.
Her account of that final night painted a picture of panicked damage control: Marcela shaking her awake, screaming that something was wrong, the two women dragging Devonte into the bathroom, lowering his limp body into a tub of warm water in a futile attempt to shock him back to life.
But the timeline did not match. The rigor mortis had already set in. The medical evidence showed a pattern of prolonged starvation and abuse, not a sudden tragedy.
Investigators found food in the apartment, plenty of it, but Devonte had not been allowed to eat. He had been locked in a pantry, isolated from his siblings, hidden from caseworkers who made nine separate visits to the apartment between November and December 2004, only to be met with silence. The family had claimed they moved out of the school district.
They were hiding him, and no one would ever see him alive again.
Devonte’s history with child protective services stretched back to his infancy. Born to a 14-year-old mother, he was premature and fragile from the start, with developmental delays and special needs that required constant attention. When he was just two months old, CPS opened a file after reports that Marcela was not watching him properly.
The agency monitored the home for six months but did not remove him. In 1999, after new reports surfaced of his hair falling out, bruises along his spine, swollen lips, and signs of trauma to his genitals, Devonte and his baby sister were taken into foster care. The evidence of abuse was clear, and the blame fell on Coleman.
Marcela fought to get her children back, and after a year in the system, she succeeded, but only after promising to end her relationship with Coleman and keep her away from the kids. For a time, the household appeared calm. Then in late 2000, Marcela gave birth to a third child, and by 2002, Coleman had quietly moved back in.
Devonte started school, but red flags quickly emerged. Multiple reports alleged physical and medical neglect, prompting CPS to open another case. When workers interviewed the children, they denied everything, insisting everything was fine.
Behind closed doors, the isolation had already begun. Devonte stopped attending school. Doctor visits ceased.
The family went dark.
Prosecutors offered both women a deal before trial: plead guilty and serve life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. Marcela Williams took the deal. She will be eligible for parole in 2044.
Lisa Coleman refused. That decision sealed her fate. To pursue the death penalty, the state needed to prove an additional felony beyond the murder itself, and they found it in kidnapping, pointing to the cord marks on Devonte’s wrists and ankles, the pantry where he was locked, and years of isolation.
They argued this was not simply abuse; it was captivity. They showed the jury photographs of the scars, the golf club, the cords, and told them Coleman had beaten and bound this child while starving him over time.
Her defense attorney fought back, arguing she did not live in the house full-time, that Devonte had always been underweight even as a baby, that his death was a tragic result of bad parenting rather than murder. “Lisa is absolutely innocent of capital murder,” he insisted, warning that executing her would mean executing an innocent person. The jury did not buy it.
They deliberated for one hour before finding Coleman guilty of capital murder and sentencing her to death. For eight years, her legal team appealed, arguing that the kidnapping charge did not hold because Devonte had not been taken from his home, and that under Texas law, the death penalty should not apply. Every appeal was denied.
On her final day, September 17, 2014, Coleman was not permitted a special last meal. She ate the standard prison fare: a fried pork chop, macaroni and cheese, carrots, green beans, navy beans, sliced bread, and pineapple orange cake, with a choice of tea, punch, or water. She spent the morning with visitors, crying at times, laughing at others, according to prison officials.
When the time came, she was strapped to the gurney and asked for final words. She looked toward the witness window, her voice calm. She addressed close friends, then offered encouragement to the women still on death row, telling them to keep their heads up.
She spoke to her family: “I just want to tell my family I love them. My son, I love him. God is good.
I’m done.”
Witnesses saw her smile. She made eye contact with an aunt and blew an audible kiss. “God is good,” she repeated, and her last words came just before she closed her eyes: “Love you all.”
A faint gasp escaped her lips as her eyes fluttered shut. Within moments, she was still. There appeared to be no struggle, no pain, just silence.
The lethal drug took 12 minutes to complete its work. In the years since, the family of Marcela Williams has spoken out, with her aunt Tracy Williams declaring that the life sentence was not enough. She argued that Marcela should have faced the same punishment as Coleman, that whatever role Lisa played, Marcela had failed her son.
“She had a chance to protect him, but she didn’t,” the aunt said. Thursday evening, justice was carried out on one of the two women responsible for Devonte’s death. The other remains in prison, awaiting a possible parole hearing in 2044, when she will be in her sixties, and Devonte will have been gone for four decades.
