Grandmother of baby killed in KC-area police shooting says MO child welfare ‘failed’
Destinii Hope was just hours old when the Missouri Department for Social Services was first called in to help protect her.
Her mother, Maria Pike, had given birth to her on Aug. 22 and made an alarming confession to staff, Destinii’s paternal grandmother said in an interview with The Star.
“She went and told the hospital that she was homeless and that she felt like hurting herself,” Talisa Coombs said, whose son is Destinii’s father.
That first call for help wouldn’t be the last. And in the end — after Coombs said she believes the child welfare workers didn’t do enough to make sure her granddaughter was in a safe environment — Destinii died as a result of a Nov. 7 police shooting in Independence, after officers responded to the father’s apartment on a domestic dispute call.
Coombs and other family members say that Destinii was lying on her mother’s chest when a police bullet hit her in the head. Destinii’s mother also died, from a second bullet family members say came from the same officer.
Now, as the family waits to hear more from Independence police about why the officer — who has not been identified — fired the deadly shots, they also have questions and mounting frustration for Missouri’s child welfare agency. If the Children’s Division, which is under DSS, had ensured Destinii was safe, Coombs said, she wouldn’t have been inside the third-floor Oval Spring apartment that Thursday afternoon earlier this month.
“They failed my granddaughter and Maria,” Coombs said. “Completely failed. Because they would be alive right now if they would have done something.”
In the two weeks since the shooting, Independence police have refused to give any details about that day, when Coombs called them to the apartment saying she was assaulted. They’ve refused to confirm that police bullets killed the mother and daughter.
Police allege that Pike at one point, when officers were in the apartment, was armed with a knife. Coombs, though, said she didn’t see one when she was in the apartment.
Independence police, the agency from which three officers involved in the incident that day are on administrative leave until the investigation is complete, are not handling the shooting investigation. The Police Involved Investigative Team, or PIIT — a team of eastern Jackson County detectives called in to investigate police shootings and use-of-force incidents — took over the scene shortly after the shooting occurred.
Baylee Watts, a DSS spokesperson, also declined to comment on the situation, citing how under state law “information related to specific child abuse and neglect investigations is closed and confidential,” except under “very limited circumstances.”
As Coombs talked with The Star, recalling several instances of alleged systematic failure from DSS, she believed her son and Pike should not have had custody of Destinii.
“I even told these CPS people, I will take care of my granddaughter,” she said. “Just give me some kind of paperwork.”
A call from the hospital
After Pike shared concerns about her living situation at the hospital in August, and suggested she was “depressed and stuff,” Coombs said the staff tried to get the mom and newborn some help.
“So they called the CPS (child protective services) about that situation,” Coombs said.
From there, someone with the Children’s Division talked to her son, Mitchell Holder, and “asked if (Maria) could stay there,” Coombs said. “And they wanted me to stay there.”
“I told them, ‘I have a three-bedroom house and plus I’m married … and I can’t be just staying up there with my son and Maria.’”
She offered to let the mom and newborn stay at her house, in an upstairs bedroom, but Coombs said Maria didn’t want to. Coombs said she ultimately told the worker she would go to the apartment and “check up on Destinii as many times as I can.”
In the baby’s 2 1/2 months of life, the grandmother estimates she went to her son’s home “like three times a day.”
When Destinii went home with Maria to Holder’s apartment, Children’s Division told the parents they needed to get services to help them.
“They were supposed to (go) to therapy and counseling,” said Coombs. When asked if the couple did that, she said, “not that I know of.”
Last month, when Destinii was about two months old, social services came into the picture again, Coombs said.
In previous reporting, a family member told The Star that a “tired and exhausted” Pike escaped to the woods with Destinii. While Pike was sleeping on the ground, the relative said it was her understanding that she rolled over on top of Destinii and had to give her CPR before rushing her to the hospital.
Holder told his mother, though, that Pike tried to smother their child in the woods near the end of October, according to Coombs. Destinii was taken to the hospital while Pike checked herself into a mental hospital for an evaluation after three days, Coombs said.
After the incident, a Children’s Division worker brought Destinii to Holder’s apartment that evening. The worker told Holder and Coombs, who was in the home as it happened, that Pike couldn’t be with Destinii alone.
“They did not ask me to take Destinii at all,” Coombs said. “When they gave that baby to Mitchell, they didn’t give him no papers at all, saying anything about him having, you know, temporary custody until a hearing or nothing.
“And usually they’re supposed to give you paperwork saying, ‘This is the plan right here, and you need to follow this plan.’ They didn’t give him one inch (of) a piece of paper at all.”
A missed meeting
The couple repeatedly rejected DSS’s phone calls, Coombs said, and any attempts to help them. In one incident, Pike cursed a social services worker over the phone, Destinii’s grandmother said.
Social services requested the couple and their child come to a meeting on Nov. 6, the day before the police shooting. According to Coombs, one of the social services workers that she consistently communicated with told her to accompany them because they missed a previous meeting.
“[The Children’s Division worker] might have wanted me to take Destinii because I was willing,” Coombs said.
On the day of the meeting, the couple refused to answer calls from DSS. Coombs’s husband, Brian Coombs, said the Children’s Divison worker told them they were going to give the grandparents custody of Destinii.
“They said they were going to take that baby and give it to us to take care of until Mitchell and Maria got some help,” Brian Coombs said.
The Children’s Division worker also asked the grandmother to check on them because they weren’t answering the phone, Talisa Coombs said.
“They wouldn’t even open the door for me,” Coombs said. “I knocked on the door, and I kept on calling out the names. They didn’t open the door.”
That prompted the state worker to visit the home that Wednesday, one day before the shooting. The worker’s door knocks were also unanswered, which led to police officers getting the same treatment when they were called next.
“If there’s no court order, then we can’t do nothing about it,” officers said, according to Coombs. “That’s when they had to leave.”
In previous reporting, property managers at the complex said Holder later asked them why people were banging on his door.
After the missed meeting, Coombs said the couple called her and voiced their dismissal of the state’s intervention in their lives.
“(Their) exact words they said to me and my husband (is) that ‘I do not want the CPS in my life,’” she said, “‘and I am going to get rid of them if I have to call the police on them.”
What Brian and Talisa Coombs say they can’t understand is why authorities didn’t take Destinii from the home.
“They needed to take that baby away from both of them,” Talisa Coombs said. “And I agreed … I will take care of the baby.”
Holder, Destinii’s father, is living with dissociative identity disorder, a relative said, and receives disability benefits.
Added Brian Coombs: “Why didn’t they go over there and do their job? … Why didn’t they say, ‘Hey, we fear for this baby’s life, we need to get in there and get that baby?”
The day Destinii died
The next morning, on Nov. 7, after video chatting with Holder and Destinii, Coombs received a call from the Children’s Division worker. The call came with a startling question that the grandmother wasn’t expecting, despite the eventful months since Destinii’s birth.
“Do you know if the baby is still alive?” the worker asked Coombs.
The question was odd and puzzling to Destinii’s grandmother, step-grandfather, and Coombs’s close friend who was in the room when she received the call on speaker phone.
“We all three [were] just looking at each other and said, ‘Really, is that seriously what she just asked me?’” Coombs said.
“And I said, ‘I just seen video of the baby,’” Coombs said. “I said, ‘I guess she is alive.’
“She asked me if I’d go over there and check. And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll go over there and check.’”
Brian Coombs said the worker should not have asked his wife to go check on Destinii.
“They should have done that themselves,” Brian Coombs said “If they thought that baby was in danger, that’s their job. They should have went up there.”
When Coombs visited the apartment, she believes Pike gave her “an evil look” because of what happened the day before. Pike threw things at Coombs and pulled her hair as Coombs screamed for her son to help her while Destinii was in the bedroom behind a shut door.
She said that Pike also attempted to push her down the stairs to the apartment. Coombs called the Children’s Division worker and the police before being taken to the hospital for her “sky high” blood pressure. She was there when police arrived, but was taken to the hospital before the shooting occurred, she said.
Coombs’s son was in the room when police shot and killed Pike and Destinii.
‘She was so happy’
Destinii and her mother were buried on Thursday. As Coombs talked of the granddaughter she saw nearly every day of her life, her voice began to break.
“She was so happy,” Coombs said. “I got tons of pictures where she just smiled at me and (was) laughing at me. I mean she was a good baby.
“All she cried is when she was hungry or wet.”
She and her husband continue to think of what could have been.
“If they would have went over there, done their job, the outcome would have been different. I know it would have,” Brian Coombs said. “It wouldn’t have escalated to this.”
Talisa Coombs said she still has so many questions.
“I mean, I barely could sleep at night because I am just crying,” she said. “And I mean, I’m just furious and confused because I’m trying to figure out why.”
Coombs said she tried to call the Children’s Division worker earlier this week and left a message. The worker didn’t call back. Destinii’s grandmother then called the worker’s supervisor. That supervisor, she said, gave her an even more startling response than the worker’s question on the day of Destinii’s death.
“That’s not our responsibility that you went over there,” the supervisor said according to Coombs.
Destinii would have turned 3-months-old on Friday. In the days since she died, her grandmother said so many moments replay in her mind. The times she spent with the baby, the interactions with Children’s Division workers.
And especially the words of the worker on Nov. 7, when she asked her if her granddaughter was alive.
“I think about that every single day,” Coombs said. “If they needed proof on that baby being alive, they should have went over there with a court order and took the baby at that time.”
This story was originally published November 22, 2024 at 2:22 PM.
