SAGINAW, Mich. -- The Michigan State Police Department on Tuesday announced that charges will be brought against a 55-year-old man accused of killing a Saginaw woman more than 20 years ago.

After the 1989 homicide cold case picked back up with a year long investigation, members of the Saginaw City Violent Crime Task Force arrested Esau Buriel, the man who allegedly murdered Kimberly Currington.

Police said what made this Feb. 3 crime even more troubling was that Currington’s three young children returned home from school to find her beaten and bludgeoned to death in their Ward Street home.

Family members told TV5 that Buriel was Currington’s boyfriend at the time of the slaying.

“We’ve been praying for this for a long time,” the victim’s mother told TV5. “What made it so bad was that he left her there for her kids to see.”

Local authorities had Buriel on their radar for many years but it wasn’t until members of the VCTF, experts from the MSP Crime Lab, a pathologist, a forensic odontologist and former detectives, who worked the case in 1989, joined forces to put him behind prison walls.

Currington’s mother, who has lived just a block from the crime scene, told TV5 she hopes to work up enough courage to attend the court hearings.

“I can face him,” she said. “I just don’t know if I can face the pictures of her.”

Buriel was arraigned in District Court Wednesday on one count of open murder.