A jury of nine-men and three women took about 9½ hours over two days to find Willie B. Allmon
guilty on all charges, including first and second degree murder and sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust.
Allmon, a 52-year-old registered sex offender, will face a mandatory punishment of
life in prison without parole when 4th Judicial District Judge Barney Iuppa sentences him on Dec. 2 for killing Isiah Melik Wilson.
While Allmon showed no emotion as Iuppa read the jury’s verdict, the child’s mother Felicia Allmon and her mother both bent over in their front row seats and began to weep.
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Felicia Allmon’s disagreements with her mother led her to stay at her father’s house in May 2009 after she and her father had been estranged for several years. On the morning of May 18, 2009, she left Isiah in his grandfather’s care. An hour later, he called to say the boy wasn’t breathing.
Doctors later determined that Isiah’s skull had been shattered and that he had been sexually assaulted. The child died the next day.
Jury foreman Zach Blea said the jury agreed to convict Allmon on the murder counts within 2 hours after the trial ended. It took them longer to reach consensus on the sex assault charge.
Blea said the jurors screened out the turmoil and drama of the Allmons family life and focused instead on the medical testimony.
“It really came down to the injuries and how they occurred,” he said.
The verdict came after the jury heard nine days of often graphic and emotional testimony.
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