His Siblings Were Rewarded for Beating Him- The Story of Anthony Rouse

His Siblings Were Rewarded for Beating Him- The Story of Anthony Rouse

When the first responders arrived, they were told that the little boy was in the bathroom and he had drowned in the tub when his mom had left him unsupervised. But they also noticed that the bathroom the little boy was in had no electricity, no windows, and the bathroom door had been closed. So what was really going on here, and was it really just an unfortunate accident?

The story that I have for you today is one that we hear all too often: when a mother doesn’t spend the first few years of a child’s life with them, and therefore they don’t bond, and then the mother ends up hating that child and treating them atrociously. And unfortunately, this would also be this little boy’s story. This is the story of Anthony Rouse.

Anthony Rouse was born on September 9, 2006, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and he was said to be a very happy baby. His mother’s name is Elise Seymour, and his father’s name is Andre Rouse. As Anthony got older, he loved to be around water, always wanting to go swimming, and he loved to go fishing with his dad. He was an adventurous, smart, caring, and happy little boy. Anthony also loved Paw Patrol as well as playing video games.

Anthony’s parents didn’t stay together very long after his birth, and he was actually in the state’s care for the first two years of his life. His mother had an open case with the Department of Child and Family Services. Elise had previously been arrested for child neglect, but at the time she had been let out on bond, and DCF never did anything about the case, and I’m not sure why.

His father didn’t have custody for those first two years; however, he did obtain sole custody of Anthony from the time he was two to the time he was five. Anthony was happy living with his father, and everything was going great. But when he was five, Andre, Anthony’s father, had to go to jail for a prior domestic violence conviction against him.

So at the end of 2022, Anthony was moved into his mother’s care—his mother, who he barely ever saw and didn’t know. Anthony’s mother, Elise, had gotten married to a man named Trey Moore in 2021. Between the two of them, they had seven children, including Anthony.

Anthony’s life at his mother’s house was horrible. Neither she nor his stepfather, Trey, liked the little boy. In fact, they even tried to get the other children in the home to hate Anthony. They would reward the other children for beating up Anthony as well as throwing him into the dog cage that they liked to keep him in.

And when Trey got angry at the little boy, he would quote take him swimming, which meant bringing him into the bathroom and nearly drowning him in a bathtub of water. They also liked to withhold food from Anthony.

Anthony desperately wanted to go live with his father again. Andre said that during the phone calls he had with Anthony, he would beg him to come get him so he could go live with him. Now, Andre knew that Anthony sounded sad in these phone calls, and he figured that something was wrong, but he had no idea the extent of the abuse that was actually happening to him.

But knowing that something wasn’t right, as soon as Andre got out of jail, he started fighting for custody back of Anthony. But then, on Saturday, April 22, 2023, around 3:00 p.m., a 911 call was placed from Elise’s cell phone. The Polk County Sheriff’s Office and Polk County Fire Rescue responded to the Winter Haven home.

They had been told that there was a six-year-old boy who had nearly drowned and was unresponsive. Upon arrival, Elise told first responders that she had sent Anthony to the bathroom because he had urinated on himself. After about 20 minutes, Elise finally went in there and checked on him. During those 20 minutes, by the way, Elise was browsing on TikTok—very important stuff.

When Elise said that she went to check on him, the bathroom door was locked. She started banging on the door, telling Anthony to open it, but she got no response. So she called to Trey to get the key for the bathroom. He brought the key over, but it didn’t work, so he was able to get the door open with a metal fork.

And once they did, they saw Anthony laying face down in the bathtub full of water. Trey then removed him from the bathtub and started to give him CPR while he called for Elise to dial 911. At this point, Anthony was still alive, but barely clinging to life.

Anthony was transported from his home to the Winter Haven Hospital. From there, he was flown to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tampa. Hospital staff at both locations relayed to officers concerning signs of abuse on the little boy. The hospital staff noted that Anthony had multiple open wounds as well as many scars of wounds from the past.

And on April 24, 2023, St. Joseph’s Hospital staff conducted a brain scan on Anthony, and the results came back that there was no brain activity. They conducted this test again later, and the results came back the same. Little Anthony Rouse was pronounced dead at 8:19 p.m. on April 24, 2023.

FOX 13 Tampa Bay handed in—he spoke exclusively with Sheriff Grady Judd about a case that has left his deputies shaken. Our detectives are shaken to the core that anyone could torture a child. In April, investigators say Elise and Trey Moore reported six-year-old Anthony Rouse intentionally drowned himself in the bathtub. The parents told us that he committed suicide. Well, no, he didn’t.

After getting a search warrant, detectives uncovered a house of horrors. They found no electricity, they found windows that were covered, they found the dog cage where the six-year-old was locked up, and hell there. After months of gathering evidence, the Attorney General’s office has now indicted the couple on first-degree murder.

Jail is too good for them, hell is too good for them. It’s a—I said, it’s a real tough, tough pill, uh, pill to swallow. Sitting down with us in June, Anthony’s father, Andre Rouse, who shared custody, told us he had no idea what his son was going through, wishing someone had spoken up. See something, say something—that phrase is very looked over.

On the phone tonight, Rouse said he’s glad to see the increased charges and looks forward to seeing Elise and Trey in court. He agrees even life in prison is hardly justice for taking away his beautiful boy. Even at that, being locked up in the state prison system, they won’t be locked in a dog cage and physically and emotionally tortured. They are bad, bad people, and they deserve to be locked up.

A search warrant was obtained for Elise and Trey’s home, and investigators noted several concerning observations. The lights did not work on the side of the home where the children’s rooms were, as well as the bathroom that Anthony had been found in. Trey admitted to turning off the breaker to this part of the house a few weeks prior, I’m guessing as some kind of odd, cruel punishment.

The bathroom that Anthony had been sent to had no electricity as well as no windows, so no natural source of light, and the door had been closed at the time. Anthony had also been specifically sent to that bathroom because he was not to be trusted in the other bathroom, the one that had electricity.

Additionally, the lock that was put on the children’s bedroom door—the one that Anthony also slept in—was put on backwards so that they could lock the children into their room whenever they didn’t feel like dealing with them. And in the children’s bedroom, along with no electricity, there was also clothes discovered all over the place with urine and feces on them.

There was also feces smeared inside the closet that was in that room, and medications that Anthony had been prescribed were found in the home, but upon counting them, it was discovered that Anthony had not been given the proper dose. They also found a dog cage in the garage, the same dog cage that they made Anthony spend hours on hours in.

Now, during her interview with detectives, Elise gave multiple different statements. At first, she said that when she sent Anthony to the bathroom, he yelled and slammed the door behind her. She said that she then went to check on him as soon as he slammed the door, but then she later told investigators that that wasn’t true and she only went to check on them 20 minutes later.

At that time, Elise also declined to let police officers search her cell phone. Elise said that she could not remember the incident correctly because every time she thinks about it, she gets anxiety. Oh, boohoo, poor you. At least you’re still alive.

Now, an interview was also conducted with Trey, and during his interview, he consented to letting police search his phone. But during the search of his phone, Trey told police he had deleted all of his text messages between him and Elise. Trey said that he deleted them because he always deletes all his messages on his phone. Yeah, that’s normal, that’s what everybody does, nothing suspicious about that.

He then told them that Elise had texted him in the past about the children, including Anthony, and he also said that he knew Elise took a lot of pictures of the children too, so she might have those on her cell phone. Trey also told the detectives that when he was at work during the day, Elise often couldn’t handle the children, and at one time she had told him that he needed to come home before she quote went to jail.

On April 28, a search warrant was obtained for Elise’s cell phone to undergo forensic examination. Some of the text messages that they found on the phone are from between April 1 and April 21, the day before Anthony had been found unresponsive. Some of the messages the detectives found were as follows:

In one, Elise says, “Bro, I’m going to end up killing this fat []. My house is getting effing dirty ‘cuz of him, walls and garage turning f-ing black, got marks and [], like bro.” Elise also says, and this is paraphrasing, “I don’t know, he’s trying to get me to go hurt him. I think he gets a thrill from it.” Apparently Anthony had screamed at her, “You’re effing ugly and I effing hate you.” I mean, fair, fair. And later she sent a text message saying, “He needs to go night-night ASAP.”

Another one from Elise to Trey says, “No one getting no nap. You stayed up all night drunk torturing Anthony.” And then she also said how much she hated him, referring to Anthony. Elise had also said that she was going to quote break Anthony’s mouth, and she had also text messaged Trey telling him to let Anthony know he should go kill himself.

At one point, other text messages revealed how they hid Anthony in the garage whenever they had guests over. For some reason, on April 15, Elise texts this to Trey: “Couldn’t get him out and honestly don’t want him out,” talking about Anthony. Trey then replies back, “Why can’t you just do the right thing until you can sign him over to the agency? What is the point of compromising everything just for a sick, twisted way of revenge? It serves no purpose and it doesn’t work.”

So I’m assuming he means that she was trying to get revenge on her ex by doing all this to Anthony—that’s my guess. Elise then responds back, “Man boy, it was okay when you were doing it though.”

The day before Anthony was rushed to the hospital, April 21, Elise said, “Street Runner is so important to me. It makes me cry about you. It’s so relatable to me, especially the girl’s whole part in the song, everything she sings. If I ever killed Anthony, it would be to that song.” The day before he was found, uh-huh.

The same day, she also told Trey that she wanted to put him up for adoption. Multiple images were recovered from Elise’s cell phone—images showing Anthony in the dog crate, along with one of her other children having red marks all over their body at the time they were taken. These images were also shared with Trey.

Two interviews were conducted with Anthony’s 10-year-old brother. During the first interview, he said something much different than he did the second time. He said that the reason why he lied the first time was because he was afraid that if he told the truth, Trey would go to jail, and if Trey went to jail, his mother said that she would choke him.

So the other children in the house were very clearly being mistreated as well. The sibling also told investigators that Trey would take Anthony to the bathroom to go swimming, as he called it. He said the day Anthony had been taken to the hospital, he had actually watched Trey drown his brother.

Trey had yelled at him to go in the other room, but shocked, the little boy just stated that he watched as Trey was performing CPR on Anthony. That’s when his brother finally left the bathroom. He also detailed repeated abuse, saying that Trey would put the boys in chokeholds in order to get them to go to sleep. He also told how the couple would routinely lock them in their rooms.

In May, the Sheriff’s Office obtained felony warrants for the couple, and they were both placed under arrest. Both Elise and Trey remain in the custody of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. They were originally charged with aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter of a child, two felony child abuse offenses, and causing a minor to become delinquent.

Elise was also slapped with an additional charge of tampering with a witness in a capital felony case. And on August 23, she asked that her bail be reduced because she couldn’t afford it. Yeah, it doesn’t look like it was approved, though.

On August 31, they were indicted with their charges. They were also both finally charged at this time with first-degree murder. They are actually due back in court this month, October. All six of Elise and Trey’s other children now need services for all the things that they had gone through at the hands of their parents, and they have all been placed in DCF custody.

When he learned that his son was being hospitalized for drowning, Andre said it was one of the most heartbreaking moments of his life. He says, “My body shook, I dropped to my knees and started sobbing. I knew it wasn’t going to end well.”

Anthony’s devastated father remembers his last conversation with his son nearly word by word. His last request was a birthday gift from his father. He said, “Daddy, my birthday is coming up,” and he told his dad that he wanted a Nintendo Switch. He also remembers that in that conversation he told Anthony he would be leaving on a fishing trip and he would be gone for a couple of weeks, to which Anthony pleaded with his father to please not go, to which Andre eventually had to tell him to hang up the phone.

The little boy so badly just wanted to be with his dad, and by the time Andre arrived back home from that fishing trip, Anthony was dead.

Anthony was cremated on May 9, 2023, and there was supposed to be a celebration of life held on September 16; however, it was pushed back, and it does not look like it has yet been rescheduled.

Well, thank you for listening to all of Anthony’s story today. It is so heartbreaking when a child wants nothing but to be with the other parent and they make it so well known to the people around them, but there’s nothing that can be done because the courts don’t allow it. If a child doesn’t want to be with a parent, then there’s something wrong.

Poor little Anthony suffered so horribly in that house for the last few months of his life, and his siblings did as well. I hope the couple gets life in jail for the horrendous things that they did to all of these children.