'Damari Was My Heart': Dad of Pa. Boy, 4, Speaks Out After Boy's Mom & Her Boyfriend Are Charged with Murder (Exclusive)

Damari Carter, 4, went missing in December. He is presumed dead and police do not expect to find a body

As a baby, Damari Carter rarely cried. Instead, when he awoke in the middle of the night, he made a loud rumbling sound that was sure to quickly bring his father to his cribside.

“I felt like he knew when I’d come into the room — even before I checked in on him,” Damari’s father, Darryle Carter Jr., 42, tells PEOPLE. “He would already be smiling.”

But all that changed, Carter says, when Damari’s mother, Dominique Bailey, asked for a divorce and moved out in 2022. Just before moving from Texas to Philadelphia, he says, she cut off all communication with him.

Then, last month, a neighbor living below Bailey and her new boyfriend in their West Philadelphia apartment building, “heard Damari screaming,” as the four-year-old boy was allegedly beaten December 7, Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom of the Philadelphia Police Department tells PEOPLE.

Related: Pa. Mom Said Her Missing 4-Year-Old Was Hit by a Car. Now She and Boyfriend Are Accused of Murdering Him

After Damari’s screams quieted, Bailey and her boyfriend, Kevin Spencer, left the apartment – without the child – for 24 minutes, according to surveillance footage cited in a police report obtained by PEOPLE.

The next day, Spencer was seen “dragging a trash bag out of the house,” according to footage cited in the report, which lists the case as a homicide.

Bailey, 28, and Spencer, 30, are each charged with murder, endangering the welfare of a child, abuse of a corpse and making false reports, according to a set of press releases this weekend regarding the child's presumed death. Spencer is additionally charged with criminal conspiracy and tampering with evidence. (The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office declined to confirm if Bailey or Spencer have entered pleas or retained attorneys to speak on their behalf.)

Damari – who talked very infrequently, according to family members – loved superheroes: Batman, Thor, Captain America and especially Black Panther, who he dressed up as one Halloween.

The child’s name — Damari, which in some Yoruba translations means “strength” — was selected by his father for its individuality.

“I wanted to give him his own name,” Carter says, noting that the name carried with it a promise: “That I will raise him and teach him to be a good man and to create his own identity.”

"Damari was my heart,” Carter adds. “I miss my little man. This is a nightmare to me. I just wish I could wake up.”

Reading through the police report and learning about his son's final moments, Carter says, was like “a mortal wound.”

In that report, which includes a summarized narrative of events from a police interview with Bailey January 5, the mother told detectives, per the police, that “she did see Kevin Spencer beat Damari frequently and that on the day he went missing,” her boyfriend “beat him so bad that his head was swollen and his eyes were blackened.”

According to the police report, Bailey further told investigators that her son had died soon after the beating and that Spencer then tossed his limp body “in a trashcan.” She refused to tell police where her son’s body could be found, the report alleges.

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On Monday night the child’s grieving family members learned that they were unlikely to have a body to bury at the upcoming funeral, Damari’s cousin, Aiyana Parrish, tells PEOPLE.

In a text message to the reporter, Parrish — who has been in touch with law enforcement in the days since the missing four-year-old’s case was opened Dec. 30 — said the family had learned that it was unlikely that Damari’s body would ever be recovered “because he was disposed of in a trash bin” and subsequently, his body likely passed through multiple trash pickup trucks.

“If he’s in a landfill it’ll be hard to pinpoint which area he’s in," Parrish wrote via text.

“We were all still holding onto the thought he would at least be put to rest properly,” Parrish wrote. “It’s a very cruel world.”

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

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