By Phillip Faseler
Assistant Criminal District Attorney, and
Will Durham
Criminal District Attorney, both in Walker County
Taking over the reins of the Walker County District Attorney’s Office in 2019, our administration inherited several murder cases, but none with more interesting and challenging issues than that of State of Texas v. Neriah Roberts.
Being a rural county on the freeway north of Houston, Walker County over the years has seen its fair share of dead bodies dumped in the piney woods under the watchful eyes of our big Sam Houston statue. In this case, it was alleged that Neriah Roberts strangled Tierra Adams, threw her in the trunk of his car, drove to Huntsville, and buried her in a shallow grave on January 28, 2008. Tierra was nine months pregnant and ready to give birth at the time she was murdered. Roberts, who held dual citizenship in Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic), fled the United States to Venezuela before Tierra’s body was even discovered.
Although we knew all this, the challenge was proving it beyond a reasonable doubt almost 15 years later.
The defendant’s flight and extradition
After Tierra Adams went missing on January 28, 2008, Houston police officers from the missing persons division sprang into action trying to locate this 25-year-old woman ready to deliver her baby. Detectives discovered that Roberts picked up Tierra from a state jail facility three days before she went missing; she was pregnant before she began serving an eight-month sentence for drug possession. Roberts was the last person to see her alive.
Tierra was reported missing by her mother when she failed to return home after spending several days with Roberts. Detectives spoke to him on several occasions in an attempt to locate Tierra. He told police that they were in a romantic relationship, and he claimed that he kicked her out of his car in the middle of the night after an argument, never seeing her again. HPD detectives later conducted a more formal recorded interview with Roberts on February 7. After that interview, Neriah Roberts bought a plane ticket to Caracas, Venezuela, and fled the United States on February 13. He had purchased this ticket with cash and boarded the international flight to Venezuela two hours later.
Tierra’s body and that of her unborn baby girl were ultimately discovered in a shallow grave on March 26, 2008. An eyewitness recalled helping Neriah Roberts near the scene of the grave less than two months earlier—this witness helped pull Roberts’s vehicle from the mud and even noticed a shovel at the scene. That witness later picked Roberts out of a photo lineup.
Once Tierra’s body was discovered and positively identified, an arrest warrant for Neriah Roberts was issued for Tierra’s murder. The next step was locating and extraditing him. Houston police reached out to their FBI liaison, who began this process. Then-District Attorney David Weeks formally requested FBI assistance and stated his office would extradite. The U.S. Attorney’s Office subsequently filed a charge of Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution (UFAP) in federal district court. With the prosecutor’s agreement to extradite, an Interpol Red Notice was issued, which required any Interpol member country to notify the FBI should Roberts be located or arrested. The FBI utilized some contacts in Venezuela and Dominica to locate Roberts—to no avail, as so many years passed by. In 2008, diplomatic relations between the United States and Venezuela were deteriorating, and by 2014 relations were close to nonexistent. By the time this case went to trial in 2022, Venezuela was in the same diplomatic category as North Korea, where the United States has no diplomatic relations at all.
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of International Affairs worked with prosecutors to prepare a provisional arrest warrant to seek extradition. DOJ advised that it would be best for Walker County to indict the defendant so that the charge and range of punishment would be known to the extraditing country. (We learned later why this was so important.) Roberts was indicted by a grand jury for Tierra Adams’s murder (but not her unborn child) on March 28, 2012, so the punishment range was five to 99 years or life. To the surprise of FBI special agents with the fugitive task force, Venezuelan authorities contacted the United States in 2014 when Roberts was taken into custody on Margarita Island for unrelated charges. Venezuela ultimately extradited Roberts to face a murder charge for the death of Tierra Adams, and this is where the case stood as DA administrations changed.
Investigation and proof of the baby’s life
When our new administration took over the case in 2019, we knew that the victim in that shallow grave had been pregnant and that the baby deserved justice too. Therefore, we first decided to investigate evidence regarding the baby’s health and her mother’s pregnancy care during the nine-month period before her death. We were interested in learning if there was adequate proof that the fetus was healthy and ready to be delivered at the time of the murder to possibly pursue a charge for the baby’s death too.
Prenatal medical records and sonogram records were reviewed in detail. We learned that both the mother and her baby girl were healthy and had received routine medical care throughout her pregnancy. After making numerous phone calls and emails to almost every nurse, doctor, or medical care provider listed in these records from over 14 years ago, we eventually located the actual nurse practitioner who treated Tierra and her baby. Throughout her pregnancy while in state jail custody, Tierra received excellent pre-natal care from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at medical clinics within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice–managed healthcare system. We met with the nurse practitioner, Aimee Jackson, DNP, at the Houston Medical Center, where she explained all the records to us. She confirmed that Tierra’s pregnancy had no complications and that her baby was healthy and ready to be born as of her last medical visit, which was only a few days before her death.
After this meeting, we knew emphatically that the evidence required to present a case for the death of Tierra’s unborn baby girl was available. But would there be other impediments to prevent that from happening?
Charging decision
The fact that this defendant had fled the United States from Houston to Caracas, Venezuela, within two weeks of the discovery of his pregnant girlfriend’s disappearance presented charging and proof issues that our office did not anticipate upon our first review of the case. After the initial review, our trial team agreed that we should do everything we could to see justice done for not only the mother, but also the unborn child. We knew that Texas law allowed for the life of an unborn fetus to be brought as an “individual” for purposes of prosecuting a murder or capital murder, so without fully realizing the implications of doing so, we filed a superseding indictment for capital murder of both Tierra Adams and the unborn child, which the grand jury approved. Things were humming along nicely as we prepared to try the capital murder for the death of two individuals in the same criminal transaction—up until about a month before trial when we got a crash course in international law.
The decision to drop capital murder
As we were making final preparations for trial, the defense attorney emailed to say the extradition treaty with Venezuela did not allow for a punishment of death or life imprisonment, and further that there was a 30-year cap on punishment (which would have been nice to know about sooner). Obviously, this news sent us into a bit of a tailspin. We read the treaty, which does say that Venezuela reserves the right to decline extradition for crimes punishable by death and life imprisonment. It also states that Venezuela has the power to grant extraditions upon receipt of assurances that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty or life imprisonment.
We then started contacting the FBI, DOJ, and State Department to see what could be done. All were extremely helpful. We were told that it is not uncommon for this limitation to be in extradition treaties, especially in Latin American countries, and typically the feds will agree to 30 years upfront before the extradition proceeds. When our contacts looked into this particular case, however, they could find no assurances given regarding punishment, and it was clear that Venezuela had extradited fully aware that the charge was murder and the punishment range was up to life imprisonment. DOJ felt confident that as far as punishment was concerned, life was in play. However, pursuing the capital murder charge to include the baby’s death for life without parole was a different story.
The Rule of Specialty
The Rule of Specialty is a long-standing international principle that says an extradited defendant may not be prosecuted for any offense other than that for which the surrendering country agreed to extradite. Once the defendant is extradited, specialty bars the receiving country from bringing additional charges. We now had to decide how to move forward. Basically, if we proceeded with a capital murder charge and included the baby, then there would likely be federal litigation because we would have exceeded the scope of the extradition agreement entered into back in 2014 and violated the Rule of Specialty. As this reality sunk in, our initial reaction was something like, “Forget Venezuela—our country doesn’t even talk to them anymore!”
But after our frustration wore off, we decided against starting an international incident or dealing with unending federal litigation, so we pursued only the murder of Tierra Adams. We did learn that for countries with which the United States has diplomatic relations, it is not uncommon to ask to waive the Rule of Specialty, and most of the time the other country will. However, most European and Latin American nations will not waive the Rule of Specialty unless the death penalty is waived, and the majority will not waive if punishment includes life without parole. Unfortunately, because diplomatic relations did not exist with Venezuela at the time, there was no avenue available for our office to even request a waiver of the extradition agreement to pursue capital murder or life without parole. We knew our answer and what we had to do—pursuing a murder charge for Tierra alone was our only option. (After the trial, we asked a State Department official hypothetically what would have happened if we had thumbed our nose at Venezuela. He responded that no one has done that as far as he knew, but it would get “very messy.”)
Testimony about the unborn baby at punishment
Our office knew that we had compelling testimony for the jury to hear from the nurse practitioner who provided the medical care for Tierra Adams and her baby during the pregnancy. But how could we best utilize her testimony now? Because capital murder could not be pursued, we decided to move this medical witness from the guilt–innocence phase to being a punishment witness. Our office let the nurse practitioner know that her testimony would be needed only if we got a guilty verdict for Tierra’s murder, which we ultimately did. Moving her testimony to punishment allowed our case to comply with the terms of the extradition agreement and the Rule of Specialty, while also allowing the jury to consider the baby’s death in punishment deliberations.
As expected, the nurse practitioner from UTMB was a strong witness at punishment. She explained all the medical records and exams showing the health and strength of the mother and the baby, including that the baby was already in the cephalic position (head down) and ready to be born at the time of Tierra’s last medical visit a few days before her murder. Dr. Jackson’s medical testimony also included topics involving what happened to the baby in utero after the mother was killed. She stated that Tierra’s baby likely suffered for 10–15 minutes before dying from suffocation. During this time, the baby’s fetal heartbeat initially increased as oxygen deprivation began, and then decreased and stopped as oxygen from her mother ran out. Without oxygen, the baby struggled and went into distress, eventually suffering brain damage and death.
It is our belief that the nurse practitioner’s testimony regarding the baby led to the jury imposing a longer prison sentence while at the same time allowing our case to comply with international law and the extradition agreement with Venezuela. Overall, our office is pleased with the guilty verdict and 55-year prison sentence as we proceed with the appeals, knowing that the minefield of international extradition issues should not be a problem.
Epilogue
We would be remiss if we didn’t point out another big challenge with trying a 14-year-old case: finding the witnesses. Almost every witness had since retired, changed positions, or changed professions. Two were deceased. The investigators with our office worked tirelessly to locate and arrange the witnesses’ testimony. We want to thank all these professionals who traveled in from all over the country (North Carolina, Florida, Idaho, and California) and across Texas to make sure that Tierra and her baby received justice. The response we received from everyone we contacted was, “When do you need me—I will be there!” Thanks to the dedicated men and women of the Walker County Sheriff’s Department, Houston Police Department, Texas Rangers, DPS Forensics, and the FBI, along with other medical expert witnesses. Justice for Tierra and her unborn baby couldn’t have happened without them.
Another note to add: After the trial, a Motion for New Trial was filed. The original trial judge recused himself and a visiting judge was appointed to decide the motion for new trial, which was granted (to our surprise). The State appealed, oral arguments were heard, and we were successful when the 10th Court of Appeals reversed the new trial order on July 11, 2024, and reinstated the defendant’s murder conviction and 55-year sentence. That saga itself could merit another article, but suffice to say we are pleased with the outcome.