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Woman Charged in Death of Myls Dobson Said She Tried to 'Show Him the Love'

By Janon Fisher | April 10, 2014 2:46pm
 In many ways, the woman accused of torturing a 4-year-old boy in Midtown grew up in the same environment as the child she's accused of hurting.
Kryzie King confession
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WARNING: The following story contains explicit information.

MIDTOWN — She claimed to show him real love, but authorities believe she wound up killing him.

Kryzie King, 28, charged with torturing and starving 4-year-old Myls Dobson for two weeks in a luxury Manhattan high-rise said she wanted to give the boy a Christmas to remember, according court records.

She was an unlikely babysitter after the boy's father — Okee Wade — dropped him off a day before his arrest on an outstanding warrant in New Jersey, but she said she tried to make the best of it.

"I went out an got a tree for Christmas so me and Myles [sic] could have fun puttin together," she wrote in her statement to police after her arrest. "I have cancelled my plans to Jamaica just so I could make Myles feel like he was at home."

Ashley Dobson
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Colleton County Sheriffs Office

King, who struggled to hold down work, but eventually built clientele as a hairstylist and a model for dance party flyers — said she spent $900 on Myls' Christmas, including a video gaming console.

Wade, whom she had met at a public assistance facility years before, called several times from lockup to speak to the child, and promised that his incarceration was a big mistake, King told police. He promised to be back soon.

"I mean, I took in a child that not mines and try to give him the world and him didn't care," King wrote in her statement. "Christmas time I had family and friends over to show him what love is really like."

The day after the holiday, King said things quickly went downhill. Myls stopped eating, demanding fast food from McDonald's, she said.

The next day, she claimed, he became destructive, cutting up King's comforter with a pair of scissors. She forced him to stand in the corner for two to three hours as punishment. When King wasn't satisfied that he was remorseful for what he had done, she put him back in the corner for two more hours, she wrote.

She said it was no different than the discipline she had recieved from her own foster family, who she said beat her with belts when she didn't listen, she wrote.

King claimed that she tried to make the best of the situation with Myls, taking him ice skating at Rockefeller Center and to Dave & Buster's with a friend and the friend's 6-year-old daughter.

"Myls hit the other little girl," King claimed. "He's becoming increasingly more difficult."

King told police that she was trying to show the boy a better life than the one he was raised in.

"I just try to give and show him the love his mom and dad could [not] give cause of they troubled lives," wrote King.

Despite a long history of incarceration and sexual assault, Wade gained custody of his son 2011, after Myls' mother, Ashley Dobson, was found to be unfit to care for him.

The city's child protective services failed to notice that Wade was in and out of jail while they had an open case on Myls, they later admitted. The case was closed shortly before Wade turned the boy over to King, sparking calls for reform.

As King's frustration with the boy increased, her punishment grew more severe, according to her criminal complaint.

On Dec. 29, she admitted she heated up the oven and then removed the hot rack with an oven mitt and pressed it against the boy's right leg.

"To discipline him I would flick his hands and would flick his lips," she said.

But detectives said they were more than flicks. Myls' body was wracked with burns and bruises, along with scratches to his torso and genitals, they said.

King claimed that the boy cut the power cord of the Play Station that she had bought him for Christmas. She chased him around the apartment, pulling him out from under the bed where he was hiding.

The next day she beat Myls half a dozen times with a belt, police said. She tied the boy's hands and feet with shoelaces and stuck a blue/green cloth in his mouth to gag him.

"That day I beat him, hit him and before I beat him, I told him to pull his pants down and might have hit him in the privates and not known it," she said. "I gagged him to keep him from screaming. I then put him in the bathroom with the lights out and locked him in the bathroom for 2-3 hours."

She claimed that the cuts and scratches found on the boy's private parts, face and stomach were self-inflicted. She told cops that she even bought an ointment to treat his condition.

King's lawyer, Bryan Konoski, did not return calls for comment.

On Jan. 4, the boy defecated on the bathroom floor.

"That made me angry," she said. "I hit him 12-13 times. He kept on moving around and tried to defend himself."

On Jan. 7, to punish him for screaming and yelling, King put Dobson outside during the freezing weather of the Polar Vortex.

"I put him on the terrace for 20-30 minutes, maybe an hour," she said. "He was wearing boxers and a v-neck T-shirt."

The next day, King got up, took a shower and said she was planning to take Myls to the hospital because he wasn't eating. She said she put him in the shower to get him ready and left him there.

"He was giving me a hard time," she said. "He was hiding behind the door. We were in a tug of war. He smacked his head on the wall behind the door and the door itself."

She claimed she forced Myls under the shower spray and he fell, hitting his head. She said she left him in the shower so she could do other things. Soon, she heard a thump and when she went back in, foam was coming out of his mouth and he was unresponsive.

For half an hour, according to the confession, she called and texted her friends for advice and when she didn't hear back she called 911.

King told police that she had thought of going to the police or a hospital during the child's stay, because she was worried that he had dropped 20 pounds because he was not eating. She said she decided not to seek help because she feared she would be arrested.

"I didn't bring him to the hospital or to the police because I knew he was bruised and knew I would get in trouble. [My friend] told me that I would get into trouble from ACS."

King was indicted on charges of aggravated assault, but after the Medical Examiner's ruling Thursday that the boy died of child abuse sydrome and dehydration, prosecutors are expected to bring murder charges.