A 39-year-old St. Cloud man has been sentenced to a decade in federal prison for illegally possessing multiple firearms, including a gun linked to the accidental shooting death of his then-fiancée's 5-year-old son in 2020.
Senior U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery imposed the 10-year federal sentence, plus three years of supervised release, on Wednesday. Though Roberto Antwan Williams still denies having possessed three handguns he was barred from owning because of a lengthy criminal record, a federal jury found him guilty of two counts of possessing firearms as a felon after a trial last year.
According to court documents, 5-year-old Dayton Patterson found a purple Taurus 9mm pistol — equipped with an extended magazine — inside the home he shared with Williams and Williams' now-wife, the boy's mother. Dayton shot himself in the head and was later declared dead at a St. Cloud hospital on Nov. 13, 2020.
Williams and the boy's mother told law enforcement that that they were shopping when they received a phone call that the boy had been hurt. Williams claimed that the couple immediately returned home and took the boy to the hospital. But law enforcement obtained a neighbor's surveillance video that showed the mother taking her son to the hospital alone while Williams tossed two backpacks into a garbage bin that were later found to conceal drugs, a semiautomatic rifle and the purple pistol that still had the boy's blood on it.
That same firearm was seen in a photo on Williams' cellphone with the caption, "my new toy."
Williams was also charged in connection with possessing a firearm found in the glovebox of his then-fiance's car when the two were pulled over months earlier. According to court records, the stop was initiated after a man called police to report that Williams tried to rob him at gunpoint outside an apartment in the city on July 31, 2020.
Prosecutors sought a steeper, 14½-year sentence for Williams, while his attorneys asked for a five-year term.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Calhoun-Lopez emphasized in a memo to Montgomery arguing his case for a long sentence that Williams "took time to hide his guns and drugs before going to the hospital" the night of Dayton's death.
The child, Calhoun-Lopez wrote, "was owed a great deal more care by Williams."
This is Williams' eighth felony conviction.
Karen Mohrlant, an attorney representing Williams, argued that Williams still denied possessing the guns. She told Montgomery that the Taurus Dayton found in the home had actually been stolen and "squirreled away" there by an acquaintance allowed to stay with the family for a short time.
Mohrlant described Dayton and Williams as striking up a "father-son relationship" that strengthened amid the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Quoting remarks from her client, the day of Dayton's death was "when our worlds flipped upside down" and the nightmare began.
"There are few punishments worse than the loss of a child," Mohrlant wrote in her own filing asking for a shorter sentence. "That is a penalty Roberto Williams has already paid."
