A North Carolina woman says that her adoptive mother forced her to dismember the body of one of her adopted siblings after the boy died from years of abuse.

In June 2024, Fayetteville Police charged Avantae Deven with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of concealment of death, one count of kidnapping related to London Deven’s death, and two counts of felony child abuse related to Blake Deven’s death.

Investigators began looking into the family in November 2023 and ultimately found the remains of the two children burned in a barrel. Social workers interviewed the children and heard of horrific treatment from their mother, including being kept in a small, dark room and given little to no food. They told detectives they were allowed to earn food by writing papers apologizing for their behavior.

Last fall, WRAL obtained a recording of a woman admitting that she had helped dismember Blake Deven’s body. The man who gave the recording to the station said he recorded it in April 2022, two years before the public learned that Blake Deven was missing.

“She [her adoptive mother] literally had me buy a [expletive] saw to cut his [expletive] open and [expletive] disintegrate the [expletive] body,” the woman in the recording says.

“She starved him so much that she killed him, and then she didn’t call the ambulance,” she said. “She didn’t call the police. She didn’t try to make up a story to tell them ‘Oh, he passed away.’”

In December, Cherish Deven told the station she was the person in the recording and agreed to an interview, telling the station she was a teenager when Blake Deven died.

“There was no asking,” she said. “There was just, ‘You do it. You’re doing it. If not, you’re getting in trouble.’”

Deven said she told detectives the story.

“Detectives know this. Everybody knows this already … It disgusts me that I can live with myself knowing what I’ve seen, what I’ve done, because someone led me on and forced me to do something as a child myself.”

Avantae Deven adopted five children from three different North Carolina counties; three were boys who were related and two were girls, unrelated to each other or the boys.

Blake Deven was last seen in 2022. Investigators believe he was starved until his body couldn’t handle it anymore. London Deven also died from neglect and starvation and was last seen in 2019.