Toddler Rescued After Killing Of Mom

Underneath an abandoned house, in the dark and dirt of a narrow crawl space, Detective Cindy Luke pressed her cheek against the boy’s tiny face, and the tremors racking his body seemed to subside.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she reassured the 2-year-old again and again, cradling his body as if she were his mother.

Oz Shapiro Decator had been beaten unconscious and left to die in the cold under a dirty scrap of carpeting - allegedly by the man accused of stabbing and beating to death the boy’s mother.

After Shelton Jackson’s arrest Tuesday, he drew police a map showing them where they could find his girlfriend’s little boy. Police had searched with bloodhounds for the boy after firefighters discovered his mother dead earlier Tuesday when they put out a fire at their home.

By the time Oz was rescued, he had been under the house for 17 hours in temperatures that dipped into the 30s. He underwent surgery for a blood clot near his brain and was listed in critical condition Thursday.

Relatives of the boy and his mother, Monica Denise Decator, arrived at the hospital Wednesday from Monroe, La.

Mary Watson, Decator’s mother and a police officer in a unit dealing with abused women, said she would teach her grandson about Decator.

“He’s going to know who she is,” she vowed. She clutched a drawing that her daughter made of her sleeping son that included a poem ending: “Dear love, dear child, come here. Mama loves you oh so much!”

Cpl. Tom Fultz said the boy’s beating began at midday Monday and continued for hours. “I believe it had to do with the baby crying and not stopping,” Fultz said. “That resulted in a confrontation with the mother later that evening.”

Decator, 23, who was three months pregnant, was stabbed in the chest and back and beaten for several hours - apparently with a brick - after she returned from work.

Jackson, 24, told police he had wrapped Oz in a scrap of carpet and stuffed him under an abandoned house near Decator’s home. He was arrested 100 miles from Tulsa on a bus bound for Houston and charged Thursday with murder and arson.

Luke, the detective, did not expect to find the boy alive when she crawled through a hole in the home’s foundation and spotted the carpet.

“I pulled the carpet back and he just gave a little shiver,” she said.

The detective huddled over the boy and attempted to keep him warm while waiting for paramedics.

“I put my hand on his head and prayed God would heal him,” Luke said. “I felt like a mother for a short time.”

Jackson told police he had held Oz by the neck and bashed his head repeatedly against a wall, Luke said. Fultz said a screwdriver also had been stuck into the child’s mouth.

A trust fund has been set up, and the community has flooded the hospital offers of help for the boy.