Posted by Plain Dealer Staff January 03, 2009 23:37PM
Categories: Whatever Happened To...

The Plain Dealer catches up with stories of 2008 in a year-end series of "Whatever happened to . .. ?" pieces running through Monday. The weekly edition of the feature, which appears on Mondays and updates stories from the previous year and beyond, will resume Jan. 12.

Whatever happened to the case of Riley Ann Sawyers, the 2-year-old Mentor girl nicknamed "Baby Grace" after a fisherman pulled her body out of a Texas bay?

Riley's mother, Kimberly Dawn Trenor, and her husband, Royce Clyde Zeigler, remain in a Texas jail, charged with murder, accused of beating the child to death in their Spring, Texas, home in 2007.

Trenor was scheduled to stand trial in November, but prosecutors without explanation postponed the trial until Jan. 26.

Although nationwide publicity about the case has quieted, Baby Grace's ordeal haunts Texans.

A fisherman found Riley's body in October 2007. She was in a plastic box floating in West Galveston Bay. Authorities initially had no idea who the child was. They nicknamed her "Baby Grace" and circulated an artist's sketch of the girl until a family member came forward suspecting the dead girl was Riley.

DNA tests later confirmed the suspicion.

In December, about 150 people gathered at the Galveston Justice Center to remember Riley and other homicide victims with what they called an angel tree, similar to a Christmas tree.

The lead investigators in Riley's death hung an ornament decorated with her photo.

This summer, while in prison awaiting trial, Riley's mother gave birth to a second child, a boy.

Texas officials immediately removed the newborn from his mother's care and placed him with distant relatives of Kimberly Dawn Trenor's in Dallas.

The boy remains with the same family today in foster care and is doing well, said Gwen Carter, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

-- Amanda Garrett

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/01/whatever_happened_to_mother_of.html

Emphasis added by H4K Editor