Mom gets life for murder of boy left in closet





BATAVIA, Ohio (AP) -- A woman was sentenced Thursday to life in prison for killing her 3-year-old developmentally disabled foster son by binding him in blankets and tape and leaving him inside a closet for a weekend.
A day earlier, jurors convicted Liz Carroll, 30, of murder and other charges.
Under the life sentence for murder, she has no possibility for parole for 15 years. Some of the other sentences must be served consecutively.
Prosecutor Don White said Carroll is expected to spend at least 54 years in prison.
Jurors decided she caused foster son Marcus Fiesel's death, though unintentionally, by leaving him alone, bound in a blanket and packing tape, while she went to a family reunion in Kentucky.
Carroll, who did not testify during trial, said Thursday she was not responsible.
"I didn't do this to Marcus," she said. "I did not and would not ever hurt a child."
Judge Robert Ringland told Carroll that no matter how much she blamed other people, she had to accept responsibility. He also said she hadn't seemed sorry for the boy's death.
"There has never been a sincere concern for Marcus Fiesel," Ringland told her. "Even to this day, the only remorse is that you are being found guilty and not the death of this child."
Carroll's husband, David Carroll Jr., 29, is to be tried separately in March on the same charges as his wife, along with gross abuse of a corpse. Prosecutors allege that after the boy's death, he burned the body and dumped the remains in the Ohio River.
The Carrolls told authorities the boy wandered off or had been snatched from a park in suburban Cincinnati, sparking a search by thousands of volunteers that lasted several days. When authorities began to suspect the story was a ruse, the Carrolls' live-in companion, Amy Baker, told them how the boy died, prosecutors said.
The case led to calls for reform of Ohio's foster care system. An investigation by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services said the Carrolls were unqualified to care for Fiesel and cited failure to check references and inadequate home study and follow-up visits.
The state report recommended increased training, thorough background checks, drug testing and more data-sharing among agencies, courts and law enforcement as solutions. Legislators expect to work on reform measures this year.




Oh my, this is horrible. I can't see why she would do that. That little boy had a disorder, she shouldn't have done that she probably knew that something was going to happen... she just didn't pay attention. But I personally think that she should get the death penalty, not only because she left her son with no one to watch him, but because she left him there, and he died.. slowly. What do you guys think about this? please comment!

Frozen toddler's father also faces sex charge:



A man angry his toddler daughter wouldn't go to bed knocked her unconscious and left her to die outside in single-digit temperatures, police said.
The frozen body of Nyia Miangel Page, who was about to turn 2, was found Sunday at an abandoned playground about a 10-minute walk from the family's home.
Tiny footprints in the snow suggest she had gotten up and wandered around before she died, police said.
Her father, William Lorenzo Page, 23, of Braddock, was arrested Wednesday on charges of criminal homicide, kidnapping, false reports and simple assault.
He has been in custody since Sunday, when he was charged with sexually abusing another child shortly before Nyia died.
Page, who did not have an attorney at his arraignment Thursday morning, was jailed without bond.
Page told police he woke up early Saturday and found the girl awake and playing near a mirror in the hallway, according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday night. He said he got angry when the girl wouldn't go back to bed and he hit her so hard she lost consciousness, the complaint said.
Police said Page told them he took the girl outside wrapped in a blanket and left her, still breathing, beside railroad tracks near a bridge.
Police said a T-shirt, a pair of women's underwear and a Pittsburgh Steelers "Terrible Towel," all found in Page's basement, appeared to have bloodstains.
An autopsy determined Nyia died of hypothermia, but the Allegheny County medical examiner ruled the death a homicide because investigators said it was unreasonable to assume the child had made it alone to the playground, which is on a wooded knoll.
The toddler would need to have climbed 17 snowy steps to get there.
Authorities could only guess how long Nyia, wearing only a sweater and a diaper, could have survived in temperatures that hovered around 2 degrees Saturday morning.
"Given her size, she would have been rendered incapacitated very quickly," Allegheny County Medical Examiner Karl E. Williams said Thursday. "She'd been out so long, when we found her she was frozen."
A witness saw Page enter his house Saturday morning from the direction where his daughter was found, police said.
He was back out on the street about an hour later, saying he was looking for the girl and telling the witness, "Somebody took my daughter," according to a criminal complaint.
Nyia's mother told police she last saw the girl after Nyia tried to crawl into bed with her parents about 12:30 a.m. Saturday. The mother told police she put the youngster back into her own bed in an upstairs room.
Police, emergency crews and bloodhounds searched in 20-degree temperatures for most of two days before finding the little girl's body.
The sexual abuse charge against Page came as police investigated Nyia's disappearance.
Police said another child in the house told investigators that sometime overnight Friday, Page entered a bedroom, covered the child's mouth with one hand and touched the child's genitals with the other. The child said Page then left the room, followed by Nyia, police said.








OMG! This is horrible!!! I really dont know what to say about this. It's really shocking though, I'm speechless. What do you think about this? Please comment

Prosecutor says religious parents punished their 8-year-old son to death!
http://www.courttv.com/trials/smith/020707_ctv.html?cnn=yes<<<

An 8-year-old boy is dead because of the "horrible abuse" inflicted on him by his parents, strict disciplinarians who followed severe religious doctrine, a prosecutor told a jury Tuesday.
Sonya and Joseph Smith were watching an online church service offered by the Remnant Fellowship Church on Oct. 8, 2003, but their 8-year-old son, Josef, was misbehaving, according to prosecutor Eleanor Dixon.
Josef wasn't being obedient and wasn't praying.
The Nashville, Tennessee-based church encourages parents to physically discipline their children and maintain strict dietary control.
Dixon said Josef's then-13-year-old brother told police that his parents decided to punish Josef by putting him in a small wicker box with the lid closed, then tying electrical cords around it to prevent him from escaping. After the church service was over and the Smiths undid the cords, they noticed "Josef wasn't exactly breathing," Dixon said.
Doctors determined he was brain dead, and he died a day later at the hospital, Dixon told jurors.
The couple has been charged with four counts of murder, five counts of first-degree cruelty to children, three counts of aggravated assault and two counts of false imprisonment.
Josef had threatened his family and carved the words "hate you" and "kill" into the walls of their Georgia home, Dixon said, but the Smiths never sought professional help for him.
"The evidence will be there was no trip to the doctor and no trip to the counselor," Dixon said. "There was beating after beating after beating and then he died."
The prosecutor said Josef's brother will testify that his parents regularly beat the boy, using everything from a 12-inch glue stick used inside a glue gun to coat hangers to a wooden board they called "the butt-buster."
She said the couple also used a cord that connected washing machines to the wall to abuse the 8-year-old.
Dixon said the doctors who treated Josef and performed the autopsy will testify that the boy had both fresh and old scars on his body that show that he was abused over a period of months. This evidence resulted in the multiple charges of assault and cruelty to children.
The prosecutor said Josef's older brother told police that his parents locked Josef in a closet for hours and monitored him via a video camera the couple placed inside.
"This was not a time-out. This was isolation," Dixon said.
The Smiths' attorney, Manubir "Manny" Arora, told jurors that, although pictures of the 8-year-old's injuries "are so bad it may make you sick to your stomach," the boy did not die of those injuries.
Arora told the jury the medical examiners performed a "deficient autopsy" in which they failed "to independently verify what they were saying."
"As bad as the bruises on the body look, they did not cause his death," Arora said, noting that he plans to call experts who did further analysis.
The defense attorney claims Josef's brother changed his story about the night of the incident over time. Initially, the teen never mentioned the wicker box, but instead told police he had been chasing Josef a few days before the boy's death when Josef fell and hit his head on a banister. The wicker box story came two years after the incident, Arora said.
When approached about the wicker box, Sonya Smith voluntarily told police that her mother possessed it, Arora said. A full police analysis of the box revealed nothing linking it to Josef's death, the attorney claimed.



I think this is just plain horrible. There shouldn't be a church that says you should punish your children like that...I think they deserve life in prison, even though they could have punished their child their own way as in setting him in the corner, or grounding him, putting him in his room for a while.. I don't know, just whatever, but I think that people shouldn't treat their kids like that. I hear about so many kids dying at an early age, and I think that's terrible... these peoople need some sense knocked into them. What do you think???