Authorities investigating the homicide of a Concord toddler say they’ve uncovered a history of domestic violence in the home where Jayleah Bureau suffered a fatal injury in March.
The girl’s father, Jocarl Bureau, 22, is in jail on several domestic violence and simple assault charges following his arrest by Concord police this month. He is also accused of violating his bail conditions in two other misdemeanor cases by being in possession of a firearm.
Concord police allege Bureau pushed the toddler’s mother and his then-girlfriend, Loreal Williams, at her Canton Circle home on multiple occasions, including in front of 3-year-old Jayleah.
Bureau is charged with assaulting Williams between Oct. 17 and March 15, before Jayleah’s death. At the time, Williams was pregnant with the couple’s second child, a boy born this past May, according to court documents.
Jayleah’s death March 15 has been ruled a homicide caused by blunt force trauma, according to the state attorney general’s office. She was found unresponsive at the home and taken to Concord Hospital, where she later died.
Assistant Attorney General Jay McCormack said Monday that the death investigation is “ongoing and active.” McCormack and Concord police have declined to discuss the case further.
Detectives interviewed Williams multiple times as part of their homicide investigation, and they say it was during those interviews that Williams disclosed she was the victim of domestic abuse.
Bureau was previously convicted in February 2014 of simple assault for “smacking” Williams in the face the previous November. Williams told police in March of this year, however, that she felt Bureau had changed and that their relationship was good.
During a follow-up interview in June, she said Bureau had been “very disrespectful with his mouth,” but denied any physical abuse since the incident in 2013.
That changed in interviews in May and June, when Williams disclosed three separate incidents of assault in Concord, according to the affidavit. She first said that Bureau had thrown a fork at her head, but that she ducked and was not injured. On another occasion, she accused him of grabbing her by the throat and pushing her onto the couch. She also accused him of pushing her to the bedroom floor at the beginning stages of her pregnancy with the boy.
Police say they found incriminating evidence against Bureau on Facebook that supports Williams’s allegations of domestic abuse. That includes a conversation between Williams and Bureau in January, when Williams wrote, “I didn’t deserve it at all.” She also told him she was upset Jayleah had been there.
A month after that conversation, police say, Bureau uploaded two videos to his Facebook account that show him in possession of a Glock handgun, which was prohibited by his bail conditions.
In one of the videos, “Jocarl rubs the handgun, which appears to have an extended magazine, against his face,” according to the affidavit. “He also points the gun in the direction of the camera.”
Williams told police she had seen Bureau carry the gun on a number of occasions. She also identified the gun in the video clips as the one she had seen on his waist.
When police searched the Canton Circle home in March, they found a soft holster for a handgun on a closet shelf and paperwork “believed to have gang references,” the affidavit says.
Bureau has been incarcerated at the Merrimack County jail in Boscawen since April, when police charged him with threatening and stalking Williams in the days after Jayleah’s death. Bureau was convicted in August and serving his sentence in mid-September when police filed the domestic violence case against him.
Williams obtained a final protective order against Bureau on Aug. 23. In an interview Sept. 14, Williams expressed concern for her safety if Bureau were released from jail.
He is next scheduled to appear in Concord’s district court Oct. 18.
(Alyssa Dandrea can be reached at 369-3319, adandrea@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @_ADandrea.)