The Games These Adults Played Will Enrage You- The Story of Kelsey Smith Briggs

The Games These Adults Played Will Enrage You- The Story of Kelsey Smith Briggs

Kelsey Shelton Smith-Briggs was born on December 28th, 2002, to her mother Ray Don Smith and her father Lance Briggs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Kelsey was said to be very good-natured, outgoing, smart, happy, and a go-getter. She loved the movies Brother Bear, Shrek, and Monsters, Inc. Kelsey enjoyed dancing and being pushed on the swing, and she also loved her Cabbage Patch doll that she would hold as she fell asleep every night.

Kelsey’s parents, Ray and Lance, had been high school sweethearts who later rekindled their relationship after graduation. They ended up getting married on Ray’s parents’ front porch on July 15th, 2000, but the two had a terrible relationship that was filled with violence. Police had been called to their home a number of times for assaults on Ray, and they had advised her to get a protection order against Lance because he was known to be a violent man who had problems with drugs and alcohol. Lance was even said to have punched Ray in the stomach just weeks before they got married, causing her to have a miscarriage of their first baby.

Then in May of 2001, Ray had again called police after her husband had thrown her up against the wall and put his arm across her neck. She had visible injuries to her neck and collarbone. According to Ray, this argument had begun after she did not supersize Lance’s McDonald’s meal. Following this, Lance was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor that he would eventually plead no contest to. He’d then be put on probation in order to take anger management classes—not that it seemed to help, as there were many other conflicts that involved the police before Ray finally filed for divorce from Lance in May of 2002. At that time, she was already pregnant with Kelsey but didn’t yet know it.

Following their split, Lance was not ready to let go of Ray, and he often broke into her house, leaving her notes asking her to take him back. Sometimes he would leave notes that were a bit more threatening, saying, “You want to play games? You decide.” Lance also repeatedly, and against a temporary restraining order, broke into Ray’s home and stole and destroyed her personal property, only to then leave them to be found in a nearby creek or field.

Shortly after Kelsey was born in December of 2002, Lance asked Ray for a paternity test, though it is said that it was actually Lance’s own mother, Kathy Briggs, who was the one who had pushed for the test. Originally, Kelsey’s father Lance didn’t want anything more than standard visitation with her. He didn’t push for custody or show up for hearings, and he even told people that he hoped Kelsey was not his so he could just move on with his life. But he didn’t get what he wanted because the DNA test would confirm what Ray already knew: Kelsey was indeed his daughter. Soon, the little girl began splitting time between her mother’s home and her father’s/grandmother’s home.

Now, Lance’s mother, Kathy Briggs, was always defending her son and trying to make him seem like he was a good guy, which he wasn’t. Kathy would even say that Ray had made up all the instances of violence against her at the hands of Lance. The reason that Lance’s mother Kathy likely did this was because she was trying to overcompensate for being such a [ __ ] mother herself to him when he was younger. Now, Kathy would claim that she was the one who had originally sought out Child Protective Services’ help for her own children. This is partially true because she had driven away from the courthouse after a custody hearing screaming, “Take these kids or I will kill every one of them!” Therefore, her children had been taken away. It was only years later, and after another marriage, that Kathy finally got custody of her kids back, including Lance.

For the first two years of Kelsey’s life, Kathy Briggs was also known to stalk her mother Ray anywhere she went, as well as file erroneous police reports against her. On one occasion, police stated that they had received a phone call from Kathy claiming that Ray was driving erratically and at excessive speeds. But Kathy didn’t realize that there was actually an officer on the exact same road who saw nothing to substantiate her claims. She was trying to do anything she could to make Ray look like a bad mother so she could get more custody of Kelsey. So for much of her short life, Kelsey was caught between two bickering families.

Following her split from Lance, Ray had moved her and her daughter Kelsey in with her own mother and father. Ray then began to receive state welfare assistance for some time, but she also worked multiple jobs and attended college at Seminole State. Kelsey’s dad Lance got remarried in June of 2003 and lived with his new wife in Shawnee. It is said that his new wife, whose name was Ashley, bonded quickly with Kelsey.

Then Lance would end up joining the US Army Reserve, and he was called in for training in September of 2004 before he was then called to report for active duty in Iraq. Following this, Lance’s mother Kathy would go to court to get a judge to reassure her that she and her family could still see Kelsey in Lance’s absence. It was then agreed that Ray would meet Kathy at a nearby gas station to exchange the toddler.

Not long after Ray’s father (Kelsey’s grandfather) died in late 2004, she and Kelsey would get their own apartment in Meeker, Oklahoma. Around that same time in October of 2004, Ray met and began dating Michael Lee Porter after they’d met at a Shawnee bar called Hot Rods and Harleys. Michael was a father himself to one boy and one girl. He was also the president at his family’s magnet plant in Meeker and was said to have a good reputation. But it wasn’t long after Ray met Michael that Kelsey started getting mysterious injuries.

In January of 2005, Ray would take her daughter to the emergency room after Kelsey had cried out in pain and was unable to freely use her arm. The doctor would end up finding that Kelsey had bruises as well as a broken collarbone. But after the mother explained that Kelsey had fallen from her toddler bed in the middle of the night, the doctor decided that he had no concerns of abuse and allowed Kelsey to leave the hospital with Ray.

Then just days later, Kelsey was at her father’s house visiting him while he was home on leave. Lance and Kelsey’s stepmother Ashley were about to give Kelsey a bath on January 14th when they noticed the bruising. They suspected mistreatment and brought her back to the same emergency room that she had been seen at just days prior. Police were then called after Lance and his mother Kathy told doctors that they suspected Ray had done this to Kelsey intentionally.

Authorities would end up taking nine different photos of Kelsey’s injuries, and a nurse would say that in her opinion the bruising was consistent with abuse. This was further fueled by the fact that Lance told an officer that if Ray was drinking, she would sometimes go overboard. He also made sure to mention Ray’s new boyfriend, Michael Porter. When Ray was interviewed by a detective, she told them that she knew that Kelsey’s facial bruising was from her falling out of the bed, but she didn’t know where the other bruises had come from. According to the officer that Ray spoke with, the mother seemed to be telling the truth and was genuinely concerned about Kelsey. It would end up being concluded that the bruises on the toddler’s body had been sustained from normal childhood accidents.

According to Kathy Briggs, Ray insisted that she had not seen the other bruises, but many of them were fresh, and she highly doubted that Ray had not seen them prior. Either way, Kelsey would end up going back home with her mother again, and on January 21st, Ray would take her to a different doctor who said that the bruising was not abnormal. But it still wasn’t over, and an emergency hearing was held on January 24th in which a judge would remove Kelsey from Ray’s care and send her home with her grandmother, Kathy Briggs.

Apparently, a child welfare worker had investigated and determined that Kelsey had gotten hurt while in her mother’s care. A report noted that Ray’s story about her injuries were conflicting, and Ray would also admit to a child service worker on February 3rd that she had on occasion spanked Kelsey’s bottom while she had a diaper on, but that was the extent of any physical punishment. Michael Porter also defended his girlfriend and wrote a letter saying what a great mother Ray was and how she would never hurt Kelsey.

Then at a hearing at the beginning of February, Ray would be granted supervised visits with her daughter. The following month, she would be allowed unsupervised overnight visits with Kelsey as long as Michael Porter was not present. She also had to agree to get parenting services. So once again, Kelsey was splitting time between her mother’s home and her paternal grandmother’s home. However, more bruises began to show up on her body in April and May of 2005, and once again, Child Services would get involved. Ray would say that Kelsey had just fallen.

According to Kelsey’s stepmother Ashley Briggs, her injuries were constant. Every time Ray brought her back, something was wrong or something had happened. She also claimed that Kelsey’s injuries had only started happening at this frequency after Michael Porter entered her life. Kelsey’s mother was in love with this man, however, and went on to marry him at the Shawnee courthouse on April 18th, 2005.

At the wedding, Kelsey was limping on her right leg because just days prior, on April 14th, her aunt had taken her to the zoo, and the little girl was wearing platform flip-flops. She had fallen and twisted her ankle. Once she had returned home, Ray had immediately taken her to the emergency room where she was diagnosed with a sprained ankle. The doctor then informed Ray that Kelsey could still walk, but she really needed to rest the ankle as much as she could. The day after, Ray would take Kelsey down to a child service office and make sure she reported the injury.

On the evening of April 18th, following Ray and Michael’s wedding, Kelsey would go stay with her grandmother Kathy. And even though she was just standing fine hours earlier, Kathy claimed that once she got to her house, she took four steps then refused to walk the rest of the time. But the grandmother did not take Kelsey to the doctors for the four days that she was there. She was also said to have taken Kelsey to gymnastics a few times during her stay. So if she wasn’t walking, why would you take her to gymnastics? And why would you refuse to take her to a doctor or call her mother and let her know?

It was only after Kelsey was returned to her mother’s care that Ray had become worried about her legs and brought her back to the ER, where it was discovered she had spiral fractures in both shins. The doctor believed that Kelsey’s right leg had been injured while she was at the zoo, and the injury to her left leg had likely occurred because she was putting too much weight on it over an extended period of time. He did not believe that the injuries were at all intentional and put two casts on Kelsey’s legs.

Just days later, Kathy had Kelsey again and decided that she wanted a second opinion from a different doctor, so she took Kelsey to another doctor who decided that the fractures were a result of child abuse and took the casts off her legs for some reason. But once she was back in her mother’s care again, Ray immediately took her to the doctor who put the casts back on. At this point, Child Protective Services began to suspect that Kathy Briggs or someone in her house was hurting Kelsey, but they had no way to prove it.

Then on April 27th, Kelsey was hurt once again, this time suffering a knot the size of a quarter near her eye. The story that was given this time was that Kelsey’s new stepsister, who was only seven, had accidentally elbowed her while she was sleeping. But due to the numerous injuries on Kelsey, Child Services would again get involved and remove her from her mother’s home on May 3rd.

This time she was placed with her maternal grandmother, Gayla Smith, while her mother and her grandmother got supervised visits with her at a DHS office. It was determined that either Ray or Kathy had perpetrated the acts of abuse on Kelsey and/or failed to protect her from it, but both denied the allegations. Gayla, Ray’s mother, would insist that there was no way her daughter had purposely hurt Kelsey. Kelsey and Ray had lived with her for close to two years, and she knew that she absolutely adored her daughter. They were like best friends.

During Kathy Briggs’ supervised visits with her granddaughter, Kelsey was documented to continually hide from Kathy, throw things at her, run away from her, yell at her, and even tried to bite her on an occasion. That is until finally, on July 6th, Kathy decided to stop showing up to her supervised visits. While Ray had her supervised visits with her daughter, on the other hand, Kelsey was happy, smiling, and playing around.

This time, little Kelsey had also started showing signs of a bad temperament, and she was no longer the same happy girl at daycare. She began biting and pinching other children. According to a teacher at the daycare, Kelsey’s hair was also falling out, she wouldn’t eat half the time, and was refusing naps. Everything about her had changed.

Interestingly, DHS workers continually tried to get Lance’s contact information from his mother Kathy, but she kept avoiding the request, saying that he was moving around in the military so much that it wasn’t possible. However, during many of the supervised visits at the DHS office, Kathy would receive phone calls from Lance. Somehow she was able to coincide calls during visits but couldn’t give his contact information to Child Services. In fact, Kathy actually spent so much time on phone calls during her visits with Kelsey that a child service worker had to reprimand her.

Come to find out, Child Services had also received so many phone calls from Kathy Briggs in regards to Kelsey that proved to be blatantly untrue that they soon began to disregard them. A hearing would take place in June in which it was decided that Kelsey would again go back into the custody of her mother Ray. A child welfare worker would testify that she believed that Kelsey should stay with her grandmother Gayla for the time being, and the return to her mother’s care should be phased in after in-home services. But a court-appointed special advocate who was new on the job and inexperienced would recommend that Kelsey go back to living with Ray that very day, and the judge agreed. The judge did however require that a private in-home service check in on Kelsey while she lived with her mother and stepfather.

Between June and October, repeated child service visits showed no sign of abuse, though one time a caseworker did find Kelsey out in the yard unsupervised. Then in August, Kelsey was involved in a motor vehicle accident in which a drunk driver had hit their car and then ran. This had caused a few injuries on her body that Child Services was aware of, but Kathy decided to start taking pictures of these injuries and act like Ray had intentionally inflicted them on her daughter.

On October 11th, 2005, not long after a child service officer had been visiting the home, Kelsey was left in the care of her stepfather Michael while her mother Ray went and picked up his daughter from school. When Ray left, Kelsey had been sleeping in her bed wearing just a t-shirt because they were running out of Pull-Ups and they were expensive. But when the mother arrived back to the home shortly after, her daughter was being loaded into an ambulance, not breathing. And she was now wearing a Pull-Up because, as Michael said, he was afraid what people would think of him.

The little girl would end up dying on the way to the hospital. The doctor who was in charge of the ER estimated that Kelsey had been down for about 45 minutes when she’d arrived; therefore, her injury had occurred around 3:15 p.m. when her mother Ray had not been home. Kelsey’s death would end up being ruled as a homicide from blunt force trauma due to a kick to the stomach. It was also later determined that she had been sexually assaulted.

Shortly after Kelsey’s death, Michael Porter’s daughter would speak with her guidance counselor and say that her father had told her not to mention what went on in the home. She went on to tell the counselor that Michael would be nice to Kelsey while others were around, but when they weren’t, he was mean to her. Kelsey would also vomit and cry whenever Michael gave her a bath. Michael’s daughter additionally said that she had seen him go into a bedroom with Kelsey, close the door, and then when Kelsey came out, she was crying. Authorities would then end up finding CP on Michael’s personal computer, and on October 20th, nine days after Kelsey’s death, he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.

Now, even before Kelsey’s mother knew of the suspicions surrounding her death, she had called for an autopsy because she wanted to know what Kelsey had died from, yet her husband Michael had immediately questioned the need. He even faked a heart attack not once but twice as the events unfolded. After Kelsey’s death, right after the little girl had died, authorities had tried to contact her father Lance with the terrible news, but they were unable to locate him. This was because Lance and his mother Kathy appeared to have been lying regarding his status as an American soldier.

Lance actually was not fresh from Iraq, but rather he had tested positive for drugs and had spent time at a military rehab in Fort Benning, Georgia. He was also being threatened with a dishonorable discharge if he did not leave voluntarily due to possible military drug charges, as well as for physically assaulting a superior officer while in Germany. In the end, Lance would be discharged for no longer being fit for military service.

Now, even though Kelsey’s mother Ray had not been home at the time that her daughter had been fatally injured, she was also arrested and charged in connection with Kelsey’s death. This was largely in part due to the fact that Kathy Briggs had immediately made it her mission to begin spreading misinformation about Ray and had created a public campaign to have her arrested. Kathy had also begun emailing Michael Porter, who was responsible for her granddaughter’s death, in January of 2006 and would set up a meeting with him. Subsequently, she would tell the district attorney that they could use Michael to help prosecute Ray.

So the prosecution was now trying to push the narrative that Kelsey had been hurt by her mother long before DHS ever got involved. But the thing is, Kathy Briggs herself said that she had never seen any bruises on the toddler up until 2005. Then Michael Porter would be offered a plea deal even though he was the one who had clearly killed Kelsey. In the deal, he pled guilty to enabling child abuse and was sentenced to 30 years in exchange for his testimony against Ray.

In this testimony, he would claim that Ray had purposely hurt Kelsey on multiple occasions and he had witnessed it. The thing is, Michael had previously raved to child service officers saying what a great mother Ray was. Even after his arrest, Michael was fine with Ray watching his own children for weeks, but that didn’t seem to matter to the prosecution. They had his testimony, and that’s all they wanted.

During Ray’s trial, her attorney would tell the court that she had made a huge mistake marrying Michael Porter and they had since gotten divorced. He also said that Ray had been wrongly accused of earlier injuries to Kelsey due to the long-standing animosity between Ray’s family and Lance’s family. But in the end, Ray would end up being convicted of enabling child abuse just like Michael, and she was sentenced to 27 years in prison. She has since been denied a new trial or a resentencing.

“Either she knew that he was abusing her, or she should have known that he was abusing her, and the law makes no distinction between whether you knew or should have known.”

Now Smith is fighting that notion, hoping to have her sentence commuted. Ray had no way of actually knowing about any abuse.

“Ray Don Smith is a wonderful example of excessive sentencing here in Oklahoma, especially when you look at the disparity in her case between her and the person who actually sexually abused and murdered her almost three-year-old daughter.”

Smith’s lawyer says Porter was put into protective custody, meaning there’s no way of knowing if he’s even still in prison. You cannot locate him on OK Offender as you can anyone else who is in DOC custody. As for Smith, who’s now 44 years old, we met her in Mabel Bassett Correctional Center back in November when our cameras were allowed in for a discussion on criminal justice reform.

“The way I see justice is I want ‘should have known’ taken out of the failure to protect statute. ‘Should have known, should have known,’ because it states ‘knew or should have known,’ and it has become a loophole for prosecutors to throw mothers in prison.”

Following Kelsey’s death, Kathy and Lance Briggs filed a $15 million lawsuit for allowing the abuse and death of Kelsey Briggs. The way it was set up was that if the lawsuit was a success, half the money would go to her mother Ray, unless Ray was convicted of anything in the abuse and death of Kelsey, which she was. In that case, Lance and Kathy would get to keep it all.

In 2009, the lawsuit would end up being settled for $525,000, and a private agency representing Oklahoma Youth Services would pay out an additional $100,000. Kathy would also set up a nonprofit for Kelsey in an attempt to help pay for expenses; however, the Attorney General would end up sending her a cease and desist because of misuse of these funds. A new law would also come about after Kelsey’s death, and Kelsey’s Law went into effect on November 1st, 2006. The state law boosts the power of the Department of Human Services as well as other state agencies and judges to intervene on behalf of children in abusive homes. Kelsey Smith-Briggs’ funeral was held on October 15th, 2005, at Parks Brothers Funeral Home, and she was later buried at New Hope Cemetery in Meeker, Oklahoma.

Well, thank you for listening to Kelsey’s story today. This poor little girl was just being used as a pawn in a custody battle, and from the evidence, was being hurt in both homes. It’s so hard to say though if her mother Ray knew that Michael was hurting her and just did nothing to stop it, but between the injuries that Kelsey accidentally received and the injuries that she had received while in Kathy’s care, I think that there’s a good chance that Ray really had no idea. Whenever Kelsey did get hurt, Ray seemed pretty quick to bring her daughter to the doctors and even reported one of her injuries to Child Services herself. What do you think? Was Ray partially responsible for what happened to Kelsey, and was her sentencing fair?