Mother Who Methodically Killed Five-Year-Old Son gets 20 Years
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WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., April 8 (UPI) — A young mother who systematically killed her five-year-old son, who was ailing from health complications, was sentenced Wednesday to serve 20 years to life in prison.
Lacey Spears received her sentence a month after she was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of her son, Garnett. From the time he was born, Spears methodically introduced dangerously high levels of sodium into the child’s diet — levels that doctors recognized was not physiologically possible.
Spears, 27, faced as many as 25 years in prison but the court spared her the maximum term due to the fact it believed she has a rare mental disorder.
Acting New York Supreme Court justice Robert Neary told Spears during the sentencing that the court’s reluctance to impose the maximum penalty involved “something you did not exhibit toward your son — mercy.”
The motive, prosecutors argued, was particularly heinous. Spears, they said, continued to ensure that Garnett was regularly sick so that she could receive large amounts of attention online — particularly via her social media channels — and even maintained a blog. It’s a complex called Munchausen by proxy syndrome.
All the while her child was sick, Spears routinely posted photos of his plight on her Facebook profile. On two occasions during visits to a hospital, Spears was captured on surveillance video administering more salt to Garnett in a bathroom.
“Once again cleaning & picking up … ugh does it ever end,” she wrote in a Facebook post in December.
“She continued to portray him as a sick child for her own bizarre need for attention,” Westchester County, N.Y., Assistant District Attorney Doreen Lloyd said.
Neary called Spears’ actions “unfathomable in its cruelty” and said Garnett suffered “five years of torment and pain.”
Doctors had placed a feeding tube in the boy’s stomach during his infancy, after Spears said he could not keep food down. Through this tube, prosecutors noted, Spears introduced extreme levels of salt into his system.
“She used that feeding tube as a weapon to kill him,” Lloyd said.
All the while, Spears had told everyone that Garnett suffered from a number of maladies. Munchausen by proxy syndrome, experts say, typically involves a parent intentionally sickening their child in order to gain attention or draw sympathy from others.
During the course of the trial, prosecutors portrayed a bleak and disturbing portrait of Spears’ behavior and the tragic effects it had on the boy — including his inability to regurgitate the contents of his stomach and recurring bouts of diarrhea that reflected laborious and desperate attempts by his body to expel the salt.
And any respite attained by Garnett’s digestive system would be immediately quashed by Spears, who acted to keep the child in a constant state of ill health, prosecutors argued.
In January 2014, Garnett was admitted twice to hospitals and was declared brain dead the day before his physical death.
“This was not a spontaneous or ill-conceived solitary act. It was a serious and orchestrated series of actions that really shock the conscience,” Neary said.
Defense attorneys, who have said they will appeal Spears’ conviction, never raised mental illness as a reason for her actions. Instead, Spears attempted to push the blame for Garnett’s death onto doctors and even cited a supposed conspiracy against her by law enforcement officials.
At one point during the prosecution, a defense attorney described Spears as “a hard-working single mother who gave her son unconditional love.”
