\u201cShe would never accept help because if she did, she would have to admit she had a problem,\u201d said her brother, Harvey Sanders. <\/p>\n
Sanders\u2019 attorney Robert F. Shaw Jr. declined to make her available for an interview, citing severe psychiatric issues. <\/p>\n
As a child, Sanders could be distant and prone to emotional extremes. She had few friends, her mother recalled. <\/p>\n
\u201cComing up, Latarsha was strange,\u201d<\/a> she said. \u201cShe would go to school and start arguments for no reason. And when she did get a friend, it would be \u2018This is my best friend,\u2019 and I thought, How? You just met her.\u201d<\/p>\n Sanders\u2019 mother asked that her name be withheld, because she is trying to rebuild her life and feels judged for what her daughter did. She raised Latarsha and her younger brother, Harvey, mostly alone. Life at home was turbulent for the siblings before their parents parted, when Latarsha was around 9.<\/p>\n \u201cMy grandmother didn\u2019t believe in psychiatry so no one was getting help,\u201d said Harvey Sanders. \u201cComing up, we learned, \u2018Hey, keep our business in the house, [because] you might get taken from your parents.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n Still, when Sanders was 8, her mother was so worried that she brought her to see a therapist. The girl refused to speak during the appointment. That was that.<\/p>\n \u201cIt took a lot for me just to take her there,\u201d her mother said. \u201cSo I [was] not going back.\u201d<\/p>\n Sanders began running away from home<\/a> when she was 12 or 13, her brother said. Around her 15th birthday, she became pregnant with her daughter Shalea and was done with school. After that, she relied on public assistance. <\/p>\n \u201cAs she got older and things weren\u2019t going right, she had so much weight on her shoulders,\u201d Harvey Sanders said. \u201cShe was always on welfare, always having trouble getting by.\u201d <\/p>\n Still, Sanders was a great mother, her eldest daughter said. She loved to cook, going all out for holidays with extended family. She kept on top of doctors\u2019 appointments and grades. She \u201cdid not play\u201d when Shalea rebelled as a teenager, sometimes appearing at her boyfriend\u2019s house to demand she come home.<\/p>\n \u201cI hear stories about other people and the stuff they went through,\u201d said Shalea, now 35. \u201cMy mother would never put me in those situations.\u201d<\/p>\n Latarsha Sanders kept showing up for Shalea after she became a mother herself, right beside her in the delivery room when Shalea gave birth to each of her two daughters. Together, they took their kids to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July and to feed the ducks at D.W. Field Park in Brockton<\/a>. <\/p>\n To Shalea, the mother who raised her bore no resemblance to the monster prosecutors conjured in the courtroom. \u201cIf she was the person they made her seem to be, I wouldn\u2019t have supported her,\u201d Shalea said. \u201cShe was wonderful, I wouldn\u2019t trade her for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Latarsha Sanders met Ixer Alfred and had her son Kadeem with him in 1999. After that relationship, she fell in love with Edson Brito, and they married in 2005. They had a daughter in 2002 (Her family asked that this daughter not be named in this story). They had a son in 2009, and named him Edson, after his father, but everybody called him Marlon. Their youngest child, La\u2019son, was born in 2012.<\/p>\n Sanders doted on her two little boys. As youngest children often do, they got away with all kinds of mischief that would have gotten Shalea in big trouble. <\/p>\n \u201cI would go over there and there would be crayon on the wall,\u201d she said, chuckling. \u201cIf that was me at that age, writing on the walls?\u201d <\/p>\n Shalea was closest to Marlon, and he was devoted to her.<\/p>\n \u201cHe loved girl stuff, ever since he was a baby,\u201d she recalled. \u201cI don\u2019t know if he was going to be [part of] the LGBTQ community.\u201d<\/p>\n The family embraced and indulged Marlon\u2019s Barbie obsession. They tied extensions into his hair. He loved wearing Shalea\u2019s shoes so much, she bought him his own pair of little heels for Christmas. A year after his death, the students and teachers at the Louis F. Angelo Elementary School, where he was a second-grader, wore pink to honor him. <\/a><\/p>\n Marlon also battled gastrointestinal issues that left him unable to tolerate much solid food, and he was often sick. It seemed like Sanders was constantly taking him to see the doctor. <\/p>\n La\u2019son, the baby of the family, always got his way, Shalea said. He was a sharp dresser, and could do no wrong in his mother\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n \u201cShe would let him do whatever he wanted,\u201d Shalea said. \u201cHe went to Head Start and he came back and told my mom, \u2018They didn\u2019t give me any juice, and the other kids might hit me.\u2019 She never sent him back.\u201d<\/p>\n Sanders was devoted to Brito, and still is, her family said. He did stints in jail, but whenever he was around, he was an involved and loving father. <\/p>\n \u201cShe worshiped the ground he walked on,\u201d her mother said. \u201cHer whole world was around him.\u201d<\/p>\n But several times, police were called to their home, arresting Brito for domestic abuse, bringing charges that were later dismissed. Police alerted the Department of Children and Families, but the state did not remove the children, evidently deciding they were safe and well cared-for. A spokeswoman for DCF declined to comment on the case, citing privacy requirements. Harvey Sanders wonders if things might have been different if DCF had taken the boys. Maybe then, his sister might have been willing to get help. <\/p>\n Sanders\u2019 mother said Latarsha worried that someone would steal Brito away. \u201cIt was always, the neighbors want the husband, or I wanted the husband,\u201d her mother recalled. Sanders was paranoid about her neighbors, believing they were listening to her through the walls. She accused her mother of stealing DVDs and other things from her. <\/p>\n Sometimes, her mother said, \u201cYou\u2019d be sitting here and she would stare straight through you. I would say, \u2018Stop staring at me like that,\u2019 and she would get right up in my face.\u201d<\/p>\n In the years before she killed her sons, Sanders stopped taking care of herself consistently, her family said. Some days, she didn\u2019t shower or get dressed. She let her apartment fill with all kinds of junk she refused to part with. Sanders\u2019 mother recalls her oldest son Kadeem being afraid to throw away even an empty cereal box in case that made Latarsha angry. <\/p>\n She put trash bags over the windows, and lay in her darkened bedroom staring at her phone, watching YouTube videos on conspiracy theories. She believed in the Illuminati, a supposed secret cabal that rules the world, and she urged her mother to learn about them too. She became fixated on the death of Kenneka Jenkins Martin<\/a>, a 19-year-old from Chicago who died of hypothermia in a hotel freezer after she got locked in there at a party, and around whose death there were claims of a cover-up. <\/p>\n Sanders would later tell clinicians that she had been abusing Percocet and that she had been hearing voices since 2016. <\/p>\n But she remained devoted to her kids. A big silver handbag Sanders always carried was stuffed full of papers documenting the business of motherhood: Appointment cards and prescriptions and treatment plans, letters from Marlon\u2019s school, and one of his math journals. She carried around 19 ultrasound pictures from when she was pregnant with La\u2019son and a big red heart Marlon had colored.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was a good mother, but she just had strange ways,\u201d her mother said. \u201cI got so used to her, and just dealing with it. That mental illness \u2026 you just sweep it under the rug.\u201d<\/p>\n She could never have imagined where her daughter\u2019s illness would lead.<\/p>\n \u201cI would have taken those stabs for them,\u201d she said. \u201cIf I had known she was that off the hook, I would have taken them all.\u201d<\/p>\n Her brother recalled trying to convince Sanders that the neighbors weren\u2019t spying on her, or that the police weren\u2019t watching her house, but she could not be persuaded. Still, he never doubted that the boys were safe.<\/p>\n \u201cI loved my nephews,\u201d Harvey Sanders said. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t just put them aside if I believed they were in danger.\u201d<\/p>\n Shalea, who spent the most time with her mother, didn\u2019t see as many signs of illness as her uncle and grandmother did. But there were moments that made her wonder. <\/p>\n Sanders came to believe a young woman who lived with them for a time was poisoning their food, Shalea said. She developed a fascination with license plates, and every time they\u2019d drive together, she would point out the significance of the numbers, which she said matched family members\u2019 birth dates and death dates. <\/p>\n![\"Shalea](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/THGFUKLN3J4BRKEKFBHKM2XRLM.JPG\")
Shalea Sanders at her home in Brockton.Erin Clark\/Globe Staff![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/PNQLXZT4S5FEVJS2F3X5W4GCVU.JPG\")
A handwritten note from Latarsha Sanders to her daughter Shalea. Erin Clark\/Globe Staff<\/p>\n![\"Sanders](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/SVALLZANQGTYUXBAAIRO4IPX2A.JPG\")
Sanders (center) with family in an undated photo. Erin Clark\/Globe Staff<\/p>\n![\"Edson](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/JT2TUWBK2QM4KT2PYCED5KQCYU.jpg\")
Edson Brito embraced a family member following a vigil in memory of his two sons in Brockton on Feb. 8, 2018. Craig F. Walker\/Globe Staff\/The Boston Globe<\/p>\n![\"Ultrasound](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/FX366M262TTUZNIIM366DW6BGY.JPG\")
Ultrasound images from her last pregnancy were among the papers in a purse Sanders always carried.Erin Clark\/Globe Staff<\/p>\n