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TROY — Like a lot of little girls, Kali Martin carried her beloved baby doll “Bob” — short for Barbara — with her always.

When she carelessly left bald-headed Bob out in the rain and the doll was crushed by her uncle’s car, the little girl knew she hadn’t been a very good mama.

“She said, 'Mama, I’m calling social services. I’m calling the police,’ ” Kali’s mother Shannon Martin recalled. “ 'I left Bob out.’ ”

Four-year-old Kali’s life came to a violent end March 18, and police say it was at the hands of her caretakers, Tonya Dobson Williams and Williams’ fiance, Anthony Ravon Duncan.

Williams and Duncan have been charged with first-degree murder in connection with Kali’s death.

Her 30-year-old mother, imprisoned on drug charges, was helpless to prevent Kali’s death by blunt-force trauma.

Interviewed Saturday in a steamy room at the medium-security Southern Correctional Institution in Troy, Martin said Kali was an old soul. And Martin expressed anger toward the people she trusted to care for three of her children.

“Kali was in their care, and they are responsible for my child,” she said. “I want them to suffer the same way they made Kali suffer.”

Martin grew up in the mountains of Dobson and moved to Greensboro last year with three of her four children, Kali, Alasha, 7, and Zion, 2.

The family lived with her cousin Williams, Duncan and Duncan’s three children, Martin said.

Little Kali liked to mother her little brother Zion and had tastes beyond her years, Martin said.

“She loved babies. She loved home-cooked meals,” her mother said. “There was not a morning that baby did not say, 'I want my breakfast and I want coffee.’”

When Martin went to prison last year for drug trafficking, she gave temporary custody of the three children to Williams.

Martin said she had known Williams her whole life. And she had seen Duncan take care of the children by playing with them and feeding them.

“I really trusted them,” she said.

Although Martin said she was aware of drug and alcohol use in the house, she said she could not say whether there was a history of violence or physical abuse.

But Martin said Saturday that police investigators told her that Kali had both old and recent bruises on her body when she died, and that a blunt-force trauma to the head killed her daughter.

Martin said she is eager to get out of prison and take back custody of her two youngest children — now in the care of social services — and her eldest child, who lives with her parents.

“I hope they’re not traumatized,” she said.

Martin said she is ready to be a better mother to them. “I’m just stronger and wiser than I’ve ever been,” she said. “God changed me.”

Prison officials took Martin to see her daughter one last time before the funeral.

“I tried to take her out of the casket. I tried to wake her up. She didn’t wake up,” she said. “I still don’t want her in that casket. But she’s gone.”

Contact Amanda Lehmert at 373-7075 or amanda.lehmert@news-record.com