‘No family should go through this,’ says grandmother of slain 5-year-old boy

Five-year-old General Sema’j Oglesby’s grandmother wept Thursday as she remembered a smart boy who lit up every room with his energy and dance moves.

“No family member should go through this,” Maisha Phillips, 53, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal a day after General was found slain in a Henderson apartment.

Police said the boy’s father, 33-year-old Gerald Oglesby, confessed that he beat and repeatedly whipped his son with an electrical cord, then struck the youth with a fatal blow to the stomach.

The child was found dead at 1:30 a.m. at a home on the 700 block of Center Street. His father faces one count of murder.

General would have turned 6 next month, his grandmother said in tears, knowing that she would never see him start kindergarten.

“I got to get ready to bury him instead of getting ready to celebrate his life being 6,” she said.

Phillips and her four daughters who live in Los Angeles drove to Las Vegas Wednesday to be with General’s mother, Charlveena Veecee. Veecee declined to speak about her son.

The family said Veecee had been battling with the courts this winter to see her son, but Oglesby had blocked her from contacting him and moved out of his apartment without telling General’s mother his new address in Henderson.

Father called police

An arrest report for the father indicates that he was the one who called dispatchers and told officers his son was unresponsive. He also made a comment that “he didn’t want to flee the scene and they needed to get someone (first responders) there,” police wrote in the report.

Police interviewed a witness in an apartment below Oglesby. The neighbor said she heard loud noises Tuesday night and believed it was a body being thrown onto the ground in the apartment.

“The loud thumping continued for about two hours,” according to the arrest report. “The neighbor attempted contact at (the) apartment … but no one answered, and she did not call the police.”

The father said he was awarded joint custody of his son in February 2021. He recounted how he had previously spanked his son, then in December, he was “forced to discipline his son because he was not listening to him and started ‘back talking,’” police wrote.

“Gerald used a cell phone charging cord and hit him multiple times in the arms the back the abdomen and the side of his neck including his jawline,” the arrest report states.

The father told police that on Tuesday his son was watching a television show that Oglesby didn’t approve of because it had adult characters in it.

“Gerald took the electrical cord off the back of the Cox Communications box and used it to whip (the child) multiple times in the arms,” police wrote, redacting the child’s name. “During this whipping with the cord Gerald described (the child) as trying to move getting out of the way of where he was getting whipped.

“During this first barrage of whipping with the electrical cord Gerald accidentally split (the child’s) chin open causing it to bleed.”

Oglesby gave his child a shower, according to the report, then resumed beating him with an electrical cord. The father said he then placed a slipper on his hand and struck the boy in the abdomen.

Knew a strike to abdomen was too hard

“Gerald explained as soon as he struck (the child) in the abdomen, he knew he struck him too hard,” police wrote.

The boy could not walk normally afterward and lay down on a couch with his head on a bunny rabbit pillow, according to the report. The boy vomited, and his breathing became labored, but his father did not immediately call the police. When the child stopped breathing, the father said, he did chest compressions but could not revive the boy.

“Gerald stated he immediately texted (the boy’s) mother a couple of good pictures that were previously stored on his phone (of the boy),” police wrote. “He also texted his sister and told her that (the child) had died because he had whipped him too hard.”

Oglesby then smoked a marijuana cigarette and called 911, according to the report. Police said their investigation showed that the child may have been beaten even more extensively than Oglesby described.

Oglesby declined a jailhouse interview request Thursday.

Court records show Oglesby was arrested in September on a warrant and charged with three counts of domestic battery and one count of domestic battery by strangulation.

An arrest report from Nov. 30, 2020 said he tore his girlfriend’s wig off and choked her while her children sat in the living room of their apartment.

A grieving family

Veecee’s sister Shanteakka Henry, 34, said Veecee was left trying to figure out how to tell her 10-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter about the tragedy. Oglesby was not the father of the other two children.

“She feels like she failed her own child when she’s a good mother,” Henry said. “She’s got two other kids, and how is she going to tell them they’ll never see their brother?”

In court documents Veecee filed in February, she said Oglesby had kidnapped the boy and she had not seen him since Feb. 3.

General’s aunt, La’Quisha Brooks, 32, said General had asked his mother if he could visit Oglesby, so she agreed to joint custody last year.

“She didn’t want him to grow up without a dad,” Brooks said. “She grew up like that. Her dad died two weeks before she was born.”

Contact Glenn Puit by email at gpuit@reviewjournal.com. Follow @GlennatRJ on Twitter. Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.