The phone kept ringing, and Sharon Coleman stared at the screen. It was Tony, her ex-fiancé, and he had their three-year-old daughter Autumn for the weekend. She didn’t want to answer. She had spent months dealing with his anger, his accusations, his frantic need to control everything.
But when one of her cousins called from California, frantic, telling her that Tony had said he was a danger to himself and to Autumn, Sharon’s blood ran cold. She called him back, trying to calm him down. He only got louder, more unhinged. “Do I have your attention now?
” he screamed into the phone. “You’re never going to see your daughter again. ”
Sharon dialed 911 immediately. When the police arrived at her apartment, she tried to call Tony on FaceTime, hoping the officers could hear his threats, could see how unstable he was.
But the moment Tony saw a cop in the background of her video feed, he lost it completely. “I know you’re talking to the cops! ” he yelled. “Yeah, I am,” Sharon shot back.
“You’re crazy. Where’s my daughter? ”
Tony refused to say where he was. He said he would make her crazy for good before hanging up.
It had all started so differently. Sharon met Tony in 2015, near her job at a medical center. He was from Guyana, worked in construction, and he made her feel like she mattered. He took her grocery shopping, was attentive, kind.
It had been a shock when she found out she was pregnant. Years earlier, she had lost a baby to miscarriage, and she never thought she’d have another chance. When Autumn was born on March 16th, 2016, Sharon was overjoyed. Tony had proposed at her baby shower, and she had said yes.
But her father died suddenly that same night, and everything got put on hold. Then Tony put a name on the birth certificate that Sharon never wanted—Zoe Autumn Pereira. She hated it. But she kept calling her daughter Autumn, and everyone else did too.
The family lived in a small one-bedroom apartment. Autumn slept in a crib beside their bed, and Sharon would hold her tiny hand at night until they both fell asleep. Autumn was a bright, curious little girl. She wanted to be a “princess doctor” when she grew up.
She knew the days of the week, could count to thirteen, and loved playing with her kitchen set, cooking for her mother and grandmother. But as Autumn grew, Tony changed. He became controlling, snapping at Sharon over minor things. He wanted her to move in with his family in Valley Stream, but Sharon refused.
She didn’t want to live without privacy. In March 2019, the tension finally erupted. She took off her engagement ring in his car and handed it back to him. Tony didn’t take it well.
He promised he would make sure she never saw her daughter again. Two days later, when he came to pick up Autumn for a visit, Sharon’s mother Denise noticed he was wearing the engagement ring on his pinky, twisting it nervously the whole time. It gave Denise a bad feeling, and she called Sharon to tell her about it. Then Tony called CPS, claiming Sharon was hurting Autumn and using drugs.
Investigators came to her home. They found no drugs, no signs of abuse. They gave Sharon a breathalyzer test. It came back clean.
They even took Autumn to a hospital for an examination. Nothing was found. Tony was still unsatisfied, demanding a hair follicle test, saying the breathalyzer was unreliable. Despite all of it, Sharon was willing to let Tony see his daughter.
She thought he was a good father. She asked for full custody, but wanted to give him visitation. Tony fought back, demanding full custody himself and trying to get the case moved to Nassau County. The judge denied his request.
Sharon and her sister Nicole started to think Tony was becoming irrational. Nicole feared he might hurt Sharon. Neither of them realized that Autumn was on his radar too. In early May, a family court judge ruled that Tony would have Autumn for the weekend of May 4th and 5th.
Sharon was terrified. She took a day off work to request that the court cancel the visit, writing the request herself because her attorney was on vacation. She wrote that she was afraid for her child’s safety, that Tony was deranged, losing his grip on reality. She also said she had seen Tony stalking her for days and that he had scratched her car from trunk to fender.
The court referee postponed the matter until June. For Sharon, that delay was catastrophic. The order still stood. She had to hand Autumn over.
On the morning of May 4th, Sharon braided Autumn’s hair before the exchange. On a previous visit, Autumn had come back unkempt, and a member of Tony’s family had sent Sharon a photo of Tony pulling out her braids. That day, Tony took Autumn to a hair salon, and by coincidence, Sharon was there too. She went to comfort Autumn, but Tony screamed at her to get away and picked up the child himself.
Sharon backed off, afraid that any resistance would hurt her custody case. Later, Tony called her and accused her of punching Autumn in the stomach. He took the little girl to a hospital, telling the staff that Sharon had beaten her, and that Sharon was a drug dealer. When Sharon arrived, Autumn tried to climb onto her lap, but Tony blocked her.
It was painfully obvious how jealous he was of Sharon’s closeness with their daughter. They argued in the emergency room, but Tony was still allowed to take Autumn home for the rest of the weekend. The next morning, Tony called Sharon over and over, but she didn’t answer. She was done.
That’s when he reached out to her cousin in California, suggesting he was a danger to himself and Autumn. The cousin immediately warned Sharon to get police involved. Sharon’s call to Tony, the one that ended with his chilling threat that she would never see their daughter again, came next. While Sharon was at the 113th Precinct with police, she learned that an emergency call had come in about a car fire near Baisley Boulevard.
A man had noticed a 2008 Audi A6 driving erratically before veering onto a sidewalk and going up in flames. That was Tony’s car. A man, engulfed in flames, had climbed out, and the passerby had tried to help him, grabbing a blanket from his own car. The burning man yelled that his baby was still in the car.
The bystander tried to get in, but he couldn’t. He called 911. Tony, realizing what was happening, ran and jumped into Baisley Pond, tearing off his burning clothes as he went. But before that, he had FaceTimed Sharon while the car was on fire.
She broke down as she described what she saw. In the video, she saw her daughter burning in the background. She thought he was burning her. First responders did everything they could, but it was too late.
The car’s door handles had melted. Firefighters forced the rear doors open, but chains had been sealing them shut from the inside. A tube ran from a propane tank, left wide open to feed the fire. Small plastic gas cans sat partially burned in the front and back seats.
The back seats had been drenched in gasoline. It was a plan to burn Autumn alive. Autumn was still strapped into her car seat. She was still alive when they reached her, but in critical condition.
She was rushed to Jamaica Hospital and pronounced dead shortly after. Police found Tony because someone spotted a piece of his clothing smoldering along the road near the pond. He was in his underwear, covered in second and third-degree burns over roughly 70 to 80 percent of his body. He was arrested and taken to the burn unit at New York Presbyterian.
Sharon was taken to the burning car on 154th Street. She stood there and watched her daughter’s final moments. She later said that as soon as she saw Autumn, she knew there was no way she had survived. She collapsed when an officer told her that Autumn had died.
Tony was charged with reckless endangerment, arson, and murder. One of his former co-workers, Angel Rivera, came forward and described him as increasingly unstable after the breakup, saying the custody battle intensified his behavior. Tony had complained that his daughter was being exposed to weed, which Sharon’s family denied. Angel said the stress built up in him until he exploded.
Records also showed that Tony had been arrested in 2013 for aggravated assault and harassment involving a 21-year-old ex-girlfriend. The case had been sealed, and Sharon knew nothing about it. If she had, she said, she never would have dated him, let alone had a child with him. There were at least two other sealed arrests as well.
Sharon blamed herself. She said if she had only violated the court order and kept Autumn with her, gone to jail herself, it would have been better than losing her child. But it’s unlikely that would have kept Autumn safe either. She spoke about her resentment with raw, searing pain, saying, “He’s the devil.
His family is responsible too. They called ACS on me so many times with so many lies. I wish I could torture him and kill him. I can’t imagine the pain my baby went through.
She was burnt terribly. Her bones were out, and he ran out and left her to burn to death. Why would he do this to my daughter to get to me? I want him to live and suffer.
”
But that wish never came true. On January 28th, 2020, Tony died from his own burn injuries. He was taken off life support at 6:20 in the evening. Sharon tried to sue the city but was told the case wasn’t viable.
Nine months after the tragedy, her mother Denise said Sharon was living in constant agony, trying to move forward by returning to work and falling back into a routine. Tony’s family never reached out to offer condolences, nor did they speak to reporters. A Brooklyn social worker offered Sharon free counseling for a year. She accepted.
She also chose to keep Autumn’s memory alive. She personalized her license plates with Autumn’s name. Her apartment became a shrine to her daughter—photos on the coffee table, an angel statue beside a portrait, a candle burning near Autumn’s baby picture. Autumn’s crib was transformed into a memorial, filled with stuffed animals and tributes.
A white rose from the funeral rested beside a blanket of mother-and-daughter photos. A local high school dedicated an entire football season to Autumn, with every jersey bearing her name across the back. Sharon had Autumn’s name tattooed across her shoulder, surrounded by autumn leaves. She wore another on her arm, and on the nape of her neck, she had permanently inked her daughter’s birth date.
“Everyone went on with their life,” she said. “But my daughter’s story needs to be told, and she needs a voice. ”
