Chilling words that the father of the 3-year-old girl who got locked in a car before being burned alive said to the girl’s mother moments before her death have been revealed.
“You’ll never see your daughter again,” Martin Pereira, the father of 3-year-old Zoey Pereira and the former partner of Cherone Coleman, said to the mother of the girl moments before her death.
Following months of a bitter custody battle, Martin locked his daughter at the back of a burning car and left her there to die as he sprinted away from the vehicle.
“I always thought he was going to hurt me,” 36-year-old Coleman said, speaking of Zoey’s estranged father. “I never thought he was going to hurt my daughter.”
“My daughter was perfect. She was loving, always smiling, and oh so caring. She was my only child, and I can’t have any more,” the mother added as she was surrounded by grieving family members at her Springfield Gardens home.
According to Coleman, she and Martin had been fighting over the custody of their daughter for weeks. After her partner started acting more and more vindictive, Coleman attempted to block him from seeing the 3-year-old. Nevertheless, the court denied her request.
“I should’ve just kept her and gone to jail,” the mother said following the incident.
“Just before he burned my daughter he called saying crazy things,” she recalled.
“I couldn’t even understand some of them, but he said: ‘Do I have your attention now, bitch? I got your attention now, bitch. You’re never going to see your daughter again.’”
According to the investigators who ruled that Zoey’s death indeed was a homicide, they found the 39-year-old father hiding at a park close to the location of the car in which little Zoey burned alive.
“The only reason officers found him was that a piece of his clothing was on fire. He was stripped down to his underwear,” a police source revealed.
After the firefighters pulled Zoey’s charred body out of the car, Martin was taken into hospital where he got treated for burns. He was later on taken into custody and is pending charges.
“He did that to her. That’s not even human, that’s an animal,” Zoey’s aunt said in an interview with the New York Post.
“Hopefully he dies. I’m just being honest. I hope he dies,” another aunt added.
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