Does a video purporting to show an eight-year-old girl asking the court to "severely punish her stepfather" for the murder of her sibling, four-year-old "James Andrew", authentically capture a real-life scene? No, that's not true: The clip was a compilation of unrelated video and photo materials recorded at different times and locations. In reality, the girl's speech addressed the killing of an adult man by a police officer in Charlotte, North Carolina. The footage was recorded nearly a decade before the claim went viral on social media.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on July 10, 2025. In it, a narrator's voice said:
An eight-year-old girl tearfully requested the judge to severely punish her stepfather in court. She recalled the day three years ago when her stepfather cruelly killed her four-year-old brother James Andrew and threw him in the trash can outside their house.
This is what it looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: screenshot of a post by wybm99 on TikTok.com)
Reverse image searches, however, showed that the video track was a compilation of unrelated visuals from three different news stories.
The footage of the "eight-year-old girl" showed (archived here) Zianna Oliphant talking before the Charlotte, North Carolina, City Council in 2016 in connection with the death of the 43-year-old local resident killed by a police officer.
The man in a blue prison uniform with shaved patches on his skull was Jeremy Christian, captured on camera yelling (archived here) during his 2020 trial. He was sentenced (archived here) to life in prison in 2020 for the Portland, Oregon, train attack that took place three years earlier; in 2024, his conviction was upheld (archived here).
The little boy whose image was reused in the video on TikTok was 4-year-old Lloyd Morgan also called Chris by his family. He was killed in crossfire in The Bronx in 2012 (archived here). Neither of the two men sentenced in that case (archived here) was his father or stepfather.
Searches on Google (archived here) and Yahoo (archived here) did not show any reports about a trial involving the death of a four-year-old "James Andrew".
Lead Stories checked specialized resources that contain information about some of the murder trials, including CourtListener (archived here), Google Scholar Case Law (archived here) and PACER, but did not find a trial that would match the details of the case described in the video on TikTok.
