A New York father’s two-year-old son was still alive when he allegedly threw him off a bridge and weeks later boasted to the child’s worried mother: “Shut the fuck up! I threw that n***a into the river.”
That was the damning account presented by prosecutors at the arraignment of Arius Williams, 20, late Thursday in a New York courtroom after a body believed to be his son’s was fished from the Bronx River on Wednesday.
Prosecutors charged Williams with two counts each of murder and manslaughter in the death of his son.
Evidence cited included a video reviewed by investigators that allegedly showed Williams tossing little Montrell Williams into the air and throwing him into the river just before midnight May 10, the day he went missing, Assistant District Attorney Astrid Borgstedt told the Bronx Criminal Court on Thursday, according to coverage by the New York Post and other news outlets.
2-year-old was alive when tossed into Bronx River by dad — who later boasted to mom ‘I threw that n—a into the river’: prosecutors https://t.co/3fap1grsFL pic.twitter.com/zenGtDA0z0
— New York Post (@nypost) June 13, 2025
The toddler appeared to be alive and standing upright in just a diaper moments before he was tossed off the bridge, prosecutors said.
“The video surveillance shows clearly Montrell Williams was in the defendant’s arms,” Borgstedt said. “He literally callously threw his 2-year-old child over the bridge that led to his death.”
Shockingly, Arius Williams, according to his father, had worked with kids as a teacher’s assistant at a school until a domestic violence incident last year with Montrell’s mother.
On Wednesday afternoon, a child’s body, apparently Montrell’s, washed up near the bridge just off Ferry Point Park in Queens, local news outlets reported.
The body was decomposed, wrapped in a blanket and clad in a diaper with a sock on one foot, Post sources said.
The boy was wearing just a shirt, a diaper, and was wrapped in a blanket when he was taken from his grandmother’s home, prosecutors said.
Williams had been there with the child for a Mother’s Day gathering, “where he apparently got into a scuffle with his own mother and stormed off with the toddler,” according to the Post.
Williams had split custody of the boy with the mother.
The father reportedly went to a relative’s house 45 minutes after allegedly throwing his son off the bridge. When family members asked him what had happened, he refused to explain and ran away, prosecutors said.
Police sources said the boy’s mother went to family court on May 30, claiming she couldn’t get ahold of her son’s father, New York’s CBS affiliate reported.
Borgstedt said Williams made his confession to the boy’s 17-year-old mother when she ran into him on the street on Sunday after he’d exited a bus, and she asked where her son was. He allegedly threatened her with a knife.
Fearing for her son’s safety, the mother contacted authorities again. The father was taken into custody Monday after refusing to tell a family court judge his son’s whereabouts, police told the Post.
During his arraignment this week the Court ordered Williams held without bail.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets , a nonfiction account of one of the worst cases of child abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
