His young son was found drowned in a bathtub late last week. The father is now in jail and is being charged with many crimes.
The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office says that 47-year-old Kenton Hamilton is being charged with murder in the second degree, second-degree cruelty to children, having a gun while being a convicted criminal, and felony cocaine possession.
The suspect was caught the next morning after his son had died.
Peach State police say the event happened at a house in Kennesaw, a northwest suburb of Atlanta, on the night of August 1.
Warrants obtained by Atlanta-based NBC affiliate WXIA show that officers from the Kennesaw Police Department reacted to a 911 call about a child who wasn’t responding at a home on Windsor Court.
When emergency medical teams arrived just before 9 p.m., they tried to save the 17-month-old child’s life, but by that time, it was too late. The boy was taken to Wellstar Kennestone Hospital, but the doctors there said he was dead.
According to papers filed in the case, investigators checked out both the home and the hospital after the child died.
Hamilton is said to have told police that he fell asleep on the couch with his son on his chest and didn’t realize the child had left until a friend woke him up. He said that once the boy was found, the two adults chose to call 911.
From what The Atlanta Journal-Constitution learned, the suspect later told police that the boy, who wasn’t even 2 years old yet, “walked up two flights of stairs, climbed into the bathtub, turned on the water to the tub, and drowned.”
The child is not being named, but police confirmed that the person who died was Hamilton’s son. Police say there was another child sleeping on the couch at the time. This one was 4 years old.
Police say they found two bags of cocaine under the couch cushions where Hamilton and the children had been sleeping during a search of the house. It was also said that several guns were found inside the house. However, Cobb County court records show that Hamilton shouldn’t be near guns because he is a convicted criminal.
The defendant was found guilty of child rape in 1995. Cobb County records show that a guy with the same name has been charged with more crimes, with the most recent one being family violence in 2021.
Hamilton is due back in court on August 21 for a bond hearing. Jail records show that he does not yet have a lawyer.
As of this writing, a Cobb County court worker told Law&Crime that the case was too new to show up on the public record.
