The Jersey father charged with murdering his two year old daughter, by tossing her into a creek while strapped in her car seat, makes an initial appearance in a San Diego courtroom today.

Arthur Morgan was arrested in a nearby southern California home by U.S. marshals on Tuesday – accused of killing two year old Tierra Morgan following a court-supervised visit a week and a half ago.

Tierra Morgan’s maternal grandmother, Michelle Simmons, is struggling to understand how things could have gone so terribly wrong.

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“I don’t understand what made him do that” she says, “that’s not the person who I knew and loved – so I don’t know what made him do that.”

Simmons says the fact that Morgan killed Tierra is shocking- completely unexpected…but the fact that her own daughter Imani and Morgan “was having domestic problems – we knew, and we just tried to keep em all close to us to try solve some of their problems.”

She also says now that Morgan has been captured- and will be brought back to Jersey to stand trial – it does create an unexpected burden, “because I thought they would have found him dead-because the person that I knew- I just can’t imagine him doing that to his baby – I just couldn’t imagine him doing that to Tierra -but they found him alive and hopefully he’ll get the maximum for the crime that he did – hopefully we’ll all be able to come together and continue life.”

Simmons adds she will lean on her other two daughters – with her two remaining grandchildren – because “you know we gotta all be there for Imani – to make sure that she gets through it okay.”

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