6 months later, abused infant Giovanni Carr's death ruled a homicide, police say

Ilana Arougheti, The Kansas City Star on Dec 26, 2024

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The death of 7-month-old Giovanni Carr has been ruled a homicide, Kansas City police announced Monday — six months after the infant died of injuries consistent with abuse.

Giovanni Armon D’Angelo Carr died on June 20. He was hospitalized on June 15 with traumatic injuries to his brain, eyes, and liver, according to relatives. Gio also came to the hospital with fractured ribs, a lacerated spleen and burns on one foot.

A spokesperson for the Kansas City Police Department told The Star in November that Carr’s death was the only fatality in Kansas City at the time actively classified as a suspicious death and not a homicide.

KCPD told The Star in June that the department would not classify Carr’s death as a homicide until the results of the infant’s autopsy and other postmortem testing were available. Officers shared the same reasoning in November, saying they were still waiting on test results.

Baby Gio was the first and only child of 20-year-old Armoni Carr. The Kansas City, Kansas, resident, who was raising Gio as a single mother, allegedly left Gio in the care of his godmother several hours before the infant was hospitalized.

Carr and her family said Gio was uninjured when his godmother picked him up around 4:15 p.m. on June 15 so that Carr could go to her first work shift at an Amazon warehouse.

The infant remained in the woman’s care for close to seven hours. The godmother allegedly texted Armoni Carr that Gio was “breathing funny” around 11:30 p.m., minutes before calling an ambulance to a home on Olive Street in the Blue Hills neighborhood of Kansas City.

Carr arrived at her son’s hospital bedside around 4 a.m. on June 16. Baby Gio was pronounced dead at 1:59 a.m. on June 20.

Spleen and rib injuries in young children are often the result of blunt-force trauma, according to the Cleveland Clinic and the National Library of Medicine.

““I swear I’m going to war over you,” Armoni Carr wrote on social media after her son’s death. “I am so broken.”

The woman alleged to be Gio’s godmother has not been booked into the Jackson County Detention Center as of Dec. 23, according to court records. No charges are currently pending against her.

Kansas City police have declined multiple times to comment on whether anyone has been identified as a suspect in Gio’s death.

The Jackson County prosecutor’s office has also declined to comment multiple times, most recently this week, on whether any charges have been filed in relation to Gio’s death. The Jackson County Medical Examiner’s Office has declined to release Carr’s autopsy, or any related documents, to The Star.

Since Baby Gio’s death, both Armoni Carr and the suspected godmother have faced significant backlash on social media. Carr told The Star in November that she and her family don’t understand why Gio’s death hadn’t yet been ruled a homicide at the time.

A group of relatives protested outside the home on Olive Street in early September, chanting “Justice for Gio” and wielding colorful posters with photos of the infant.

“I’m just so confused,” Carr said. “I called Saturday and asked her (the detective), like, ‘Was there any other updates in the case?’ She said, “No, we won’t have no other updates. I already talked to everyone I needed to, and I’m just waiting on the neurology report.’

“That kind of frustrated me because you talk to everybody you needed to, but nobody is in jail?”

According to Carr’s aunt Thea Harris, Gio was a cheerful, curious and fun-loving child. Gio wasn’t yet crawling when he died, Carr said, but the “goofy” baby was beginning to teethe and just learning to pull himself up.

“He was always smiling, always happy,” Harris said.

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Previous reporting from Laura Bauer contributed to this coverage.