GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — FOX8 is digging into a Greensboro father’s troubled past.
Sterling Cummings, 33, is charged with murdering his three-month-old son. Call logs show 911 operators dispatched crews to his home on Pepperbush Drive in Greensboro six times over the past year for domestic disputes.
They came to his home three times in April 2022 for threats. Two calls came in hours apart on the same day.
Since our story aired about Cummings’ arrest, a woman claiming to be a former girlfriend of his reached out to us to share the physical abuse she suffered and lives with to this day.
When Britney Baggett first met Cummings, she said he was kind, convincing and appeared to be a nice guy. When she reconnected with him years later, she had a different opinion.
“He should not be allowed to even have the opportunity to put his hands on another woman or child,” she said.
Baggett said she suffered black eyes, bite wounds and bruises while spending time with Cummings.
“He headbutted me like four times,” she said. “I still have a knot on my head right here from where he did that. He bit me like four times. He was strangling me, and I managed to kind of get away from him, and he dragged me down the stairs.
That was in 2015. In 2021, Cummings’ three-month-old son Waylon was found in his Greensboro home in cardiac arrest.
“I just don’t understand how this was allowed to slip through the cracks,” Baggett said.
Baggett worried something like this would happen after a judge in Moore County sentenced the father to only 45 days in jail for her alleged assault in 2015 and the abuse of Cummings’ first child, who was three weeks old at the time.
Andy survived but is wheelchair-bound, blind and has cerebral palsy.
“You can kind of get away with murder so to speak because that’s what it felt like,” Baggett said. “Especially in Andy’s case because the condition that he’s in and will be in for the rest of his life. He robbed him of any quality of life.”
Baggett feared she would lose her life.
“I felt a lot of disgust and shame honestly,” she said. “I was lucky to get away, and my son was lucky not to see any abuse like that from Sterling.”
Baggett hopes this latest arrest is the end of what she described as an abusive pattern, which targeted the most vulnerable.
“For these kids and for any other person he’s harmed and ruined their lives, that it shows the kind of monster that he is, and that there’s no question about what kind of person he is, what he has done,” she said.
Baggett has faith that Cummings will get the maximum sentence of life without parole.
“I hope that he has to think of and see those poor children’s faces every time he closes his eyes,” she said. “I hope it haunts him for the rest of his life.”
FOX8 looked into Cummings’ 2016 sentence in Moore County.
As part of his probation, a judge ordered him to undergo anger management counseling. He was not allowed to be around young children without a responsible adult present.
According to Guilford County court records, Cummings’ probation ended on June 13, 2021. That means at the time of the alleged murder in Greensboro, he violated his probation.
