Mother Murders Son with Salt for Attention, Gets 20 Years to Life Sentence

 

By Afarin Majidi

Lacey Spears, 27, was convicted of second-degree murder and now faces 20 years to life in prison. She was found guilty of poisoning her 5-year-old son, Garnett-Paul Spears, by feeding him salt through a stomach tube.

Prosecutors said she finally murdered the child because she
was afraid he’d speak out about her poisoning him.
On her Twitter account Spears played the concerned and loving parent, all the while slowly poisoning her little boy. Prosecutors called Spears “a calculated child killer” who was seeking attention from her son’s medical issues while lying to doctors.
“She apparently craved the attention of her family, her friends, her co-workers and most particularly the medical profession,” Assistant District Attorney Patricia Murphy said in closing arguments.
Not only did internet searches on Spears’s computer show that she was researching the effects of sodium on young children, but hospital security cameras captured her taking the little boy into a bathroom with the feeding tube she used to finally kill him. In her apartment, authorities found two feeding bags contaminated with salt.
“Her actions that [final] day were inhuman. They were despicable. They were evil,” Doreen Lloyd, Westchester County’s assistant district attorney, said in court. She described how the 5-year-old could not vomit due to internal scarring and had explosive bouts of diarrhea as his little body tried to get rid of the poison.
There was no room for sympathy in the courtroom for Spears’ mental illness, Münchausen by proxy syndrome. Prosecutors contended that Spears had shown a pattern of sickening her son to get attention for herself, calling what happened “nothing short of torture.”