A former beauty queen looked worlds away from her pageant days as she appeared in court this week facing murder charges.
Trinity Madison Poague, 20, is accused of beating her boyfriend’s 18-month-old son to death in her college dorm room while her partner went to pick up pizza.
Little Romeo ‘Jaxton’ Angeles was found with fatal blunt force trauma wounds on January 14 at Georgia Southwestern State University in January 2024.
Poague – who once held the title of Miss Donalsonville – claims the toddler fell off the bed, but police say she caused ‘serious disfigurement to his liver’ and ‘rendered his brain useless,’ an indictment obtained by Court TV said.
The alleged killer looked far removed from her crown-wearing pageant days in court on Tuesday, where she appeared much heavier and with her hair dyed dark brown instead of her usual blonde.
She appeared nervous, fidgeting with her rings and avoiding eye contact with the cameras, keeping her face neutral throughout the proceedings.
Poague faces life in prison if convicted of malice murder, first-degree cruelty to children, and two counts of felony murder, and two counts of aggravated battery.
She has pled not guilty.
On Tuesday, District Attorney Lewis R. ‘Bud’ Lamb described the scene, saying Poage and her boyfriend, Julian Williams, had gone out to dinner with the child the night before his death, before she said she was ‘stuck’ with the kid overnight.
She allegedly texted her roommate, Paris, that the child ‘hates me and I hate him,’ according to Lamb.
Poague later asked her roommate to sleep in her room as the child was allegedly being fussy and her boyfriend was no help.
She claimed the child ‘rolled off the bed,’ but that he was okay.
But videos from her phone around the same time showed videos of Jaxton with no bruises and acting normally, the court heard.
The next day, around noon, her boyfriend left to pick up a pizza.
While out, Poague allegedly called him and told him the child was ‘not breathing’ and that she didn’t know what happened.
The father rushed the child to the hospital, and around 4pm, he died.
‘[He] didn’t have a mark on him,’ Lamb said of the night before. ‘He didn’t have any injury, he wasn’t in any distress.
‘But by the time the child got to the emergency room after spending 35 minutes in that room with Trinity Poague, he had fresh bruising on his face.’
The child was also experiencing brain bleeds and had several bruises all over his face and neck, as well as, a laceration on his liver.
He also had a bone fracture at the back of his head that hemorrhaged, Lamb said.
‘That is an injury, and I believe the evidence will show, is referred to as a catastrophic,’ Lamb said.
‘It’s an acute injury. It’s not an injury that happens hours before, days before. It’s not an injury that happened the night before.
‘It’s not an injury that could have happened, realistically, from a child falling off the bed, falling out of a chair, or anything else.
‘It’s an injury that could have literally only have occurred within a few minutes time before this child was presented at the emergency room.’
Poague’s attorney, WT ‘Tim’ Gamble III said Williams was a ‘controlling boyfriend,’ who had been drinking the night before the incident.
Gamble did acknowledge that Poague to had texted her roommate that night, but that investigators have ‘no evidence’ of the beauty queen committing the crime.
‘They have no evidence of a crime occurring at all,’ Gamble said. ‘You’ll see no blood evidence, you’ll see no DNA evidence, you will see no spittle evidence, you will no throw up evidence… You’ll see no blood splatter. You’ll see nothing.’
Poague graduated from the Southwest Georgia Academy in Damascus in May 2023, reported the Donalsonville News.
According to the Thomasville Times-Enterprise, she was a freshman at Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus, studying nursing.
She was named one of 22 students to the President Jimmy Carter Leadership Program.
Requirements from the program include a minimum 1100 on the SAT or an ACT composite score of 22, a high school GPA of 3.0 or greater and strong leadership skills.
She was crowned Miss Donalsonville in 2023 and competed in the National Peanut Festival Pageant.
