A Hartford mother who is charged in connection with her toddler’s death will remain free on bond.

Tabitha Frank appeared in court in Hartford on Thursday morning, where her case was continued until Sept. 18 and transferred to Part A court, where major crimes are heard.

Prosecutors did not request an increase in Frank’s bond during the hearing. Frank, who is charged with manslaughter and 10 counts of risk of injury to a minor, has been free on a $100,000 bond since July 24 — the day her son Cornleiuz Shane Williams died at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.

The single mother said she is relieved that she will be able to attend her son’s funeral services. On Wednesday, she made a plea to the public asking for donations to help pay for a burial for her son.

Frank said she wants to bury the boy so she and her daughters have a place to visit Corneliuz, who they affectionately called “Papa.” In less than 12 hours after she spoke publicly about her fundraiser in Hartford’s Pope Park, the family raised more than $9,000 by Thursday morning.

“It’s the most relief I’ve felt since this happened,” Frank said Thursday outside of Hartford Superior Court.

“I’m so grateful that people helped out to make sure he gets buried,” she said. “It brought a little bit of light ‘Thank you’ is too simple a word but ‘Thank you’ is all I have in my heart right now.”

Her father, Jeffrey Williams, said it was “a tremendous feeling” to know that his daughter would not be held in custody at the time of her son’s funeral.

“It feels like a ton of bricks has been lifted off me,” he said.

Frank said that some people encouraged her not to ask for help financing the burial, which she could not afford on her own. But she said she is glad she did.

“I’m happy that I didn’t give up. I was at a place of giving up, but I’m happy that I listened to that motherly instinct because even though he’s gone, I listened to that voice in me that says I have to take care of him,” she said. “My heart said, ‘If you do everything you can, you can sleep at night.’”

Frank has said repeatedly that Corneliuz’s death has broken her heart and that it was an accident. A mistake that she will live with forever.

Corneliuz died after falling from a window in the family’s third-floor apartment while home alone with his four sisters who are all under the age of 12.

Frank has claimed that she was driving for Uber while the kids were home alone and that Cornleiuz’s father, who is not facing any charges, was supposed to be on his way to provide child care.

Frank said she has been replaying memories, and videos, from the last night of Corneliuz’s life over and over and over again “to look for some type of sign.”

She said she kept rewatching videos of the kids eating ice cream that Friday night, “making sure I wasn’t imagining my kids being happy and playing and being normal.”

“He was playing, he was happy, he wasn’t crying,” she said.

Corneliuz’s smile, she said, “was everything.” When she was stressed, Corneliuz would run up and hug her and it would melt away. He was a peaceful, good and sweet baby, she added.

Now, she said, she feels like she is living in “a nightmare I can’t seem to shake loose.”

Frank’s four daughters, ages 3, 4, 6 and 12, were taken into DCF custody due to conditions in the home after the fall. Officers in a police report described the home as “deplorable” and “uninhabitable” with rotting food, insects and feces. Frank and her family have argued that the house was only as messy as any home of a single mother of five would be during the summer.

On Wednesday, Frank said that there were piles of wet laundry in the apartment because the kids had just been playing at a waterpark. The laundry machine in their apartment complex barely works, she claimed, and costs more than she can afford.

Trash had piled up, she said, because the trash needs to be taken into an alley and she claimed that didn’t want to go into the alley in the dark the night before.

Spoiled food, she said, was the result of their refrigerator breaking that week.

“It wasn’t a situation of how people think it was,” she said Wednesday.

Frank’s attorney Wesley Spears said outside the courthouse that they were very pleased with the outcome of Thursday’s hearing. He defended his client, saying that she is “a caring, loving mother that has been villainized and demonized by the system.”

Spears reiterated previous statements that Corneliuz’s death was a tragic accident.

“Mothers don’t make mistakes on purpose, accidents happen. It’s unfortunate, kids drown in swimming pools, kids fall out of windows, all kinds of things happen to kids.”

According to a police report, a DCF social worker came to the house after the boy’s fall and took the surviving children into custody because of the conditions. DCF said that they had last had contact with the family in mid-June and at their last visit, the conditions of the home were not “as abysmal,” records show.

DCF later spoke out, saying that the department had had an open case with the family for a long time and that the home had not been in that condition previously. They were on the verge of closing Frank’s case with the department when Corneliuz fell, DCF said.

DCF Commissioner Vanessa Durantes asked the public to pause their judgments on anyone involved in an investigation of child maltreatment.

Dorantes said that Frank’s home only allegedly met the statutory criteria of “physical neglect resulting in a substantiation” once before, in 2016, before Corneliuz was born.

“The last contact we had with the children was in mid-June 2023 and based on the assessment at the time, further child protective services involvement was not warranted and the case was in the process of being closed resulting in no additional visits or contact,” Dorantes said.