On the day that friends and family had planned to celebrate Taniyah Bell with a baby shower, they gathered instead for her funeral.
Bell, 19, was eight months pregnant when her boyfriend killed her in the Lansdowne apartment they shared.
In November 2024, Kaiheem Williams shot Bell once in the head with a .45-caliber Glock handgun that he said he had bought illegally for self-defense.
Williams, 20, told a jury in Media last week that the shooting was an accident. Thinking the gun was unloaded, he said, he pulled the trigger to dry-fire the weapon and render it inoperable.
When he saw that he had struck Bell, he said, he “immediately dropped the gun on the bed and started crying.”
“I didn’t think this was real, ain’t no way this was happening,” he said. “I still don’t know how happened.”
He said he never intended to hurt the mother of his unborn daughter.
But jurors were not swayed, and on Friday convicted him of third-degree murder and aggravated assault of an unborn child.
They heard testimony from Bell’s mother, Tylicia, who said the couple had a troubled relationship. Months before the shooting, Williams beat Bell, she said, and had encouraged her to abort their child.
And the jury watched body-camera footage in which Williams lied to police and said Bell shot herself.
He initially told the officers he did not know where the gun was. But during the trial, Williams admitted that his uncle, who lived with the couple, took the gun from the apartment as Williams dialed 911.
Assistant District Danielle Gallaher told jurors Williams was still lying. She said he took deliberate steps to kill Bell and purposefully aimed for her head.
“The defendant murdered Taniyah while pregnant with their daughter and wants you to look in the opposite direction of where the evidence leads,” she said. “And after a year and a half of deception, he expects you to believe him that he is telling the truth this time.”
Gallaher said Williams clearly did not care about Bell — during his testimony at trial he showed little emotion and freely admitted he had cheated on Bell multiple times during their three-year relationship because he “likes having sex.”
Williams’ attorney, Eugene Gibbons, said the prosecutor was wrong about Williams.
“What happened inside that apartment was the result of an unintentional, negligent discharge of a firearm,” Gibbons said, adding that prosecutors brought up Bell and Williams’ relationship problems to “muddy him up.”
On the evening Bell died, he said, Williams was caring for her and had brought her food from his job at a Chipotle restaurant.
“If he wanted to kill her, and went to lengths to hide the gun, why would he call 911?” Gibbons asked.
Investigators said Williams called police in a panic after the shooting, saying Bell had been shot inside their apartment on North Wycombe Avenue. Inside, police found Bell dead, shot once in the head, and rushed her to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center and later Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where her daughter was delivered via emergency C-section.
Williams initially told the officers he could not account for everything that happened before the shooting, saying he had been smoking marijuana and had “blacked out,” a statement he contradicted during the trial.
Detectives found an unfired .45-caliber bullet in Williams’ pocket, and a photo found on his cell phone — taken an hour before Williams called 911 — showed him in the apartment’s kitchen with a handgun nearby.
Williams’ hands later tested positive for gunshot residue.
Tylicia Bell testified that her daughter’s baby survived but suffered from permanent brain damage due to a lack of oxygen. She said her granddaughter requires constant care and cannot breathe, eat, or walk on her own.
She named the girl Taniyah Miracle Marie Bell in honor of the baby’s mother and the fact that she survived the difficult circumstances of her birth.
Bell said that when her daughter was killed, she felt she “nothing else to live for.”
“But now that my grandbaby’s here,” she said through her tears, “she needs me, so I have no choice but to go on.”
Williams is scheduled to be sentenced May 21.