A jury in the New York suburbs found Lacey Spears, of Scottsville, Kentucky, guilty of second-degree murder in the death last year of 5-year-old Garnett-Paul Spears.
The defense portrayed Spears as a caring mother and her son as sickly, but the prosecution argued Spears reveled in the attention his illness brought her. Video showed Spears twice taking him into a hospital bathroom with a connector tube and him suffering afterward.
"The motive is bizarre, the motive is scary, but it exists," Assistant District Attorney Patricia Murphy said in closing arguments Thursday. "She apparently craved the attention of her family, her friends, her co-workers and most particularly the medical profession."
She suggested that Spears, 27, eventually killed the boy because she feared he would start telling people she was making him ill. Spears' actions were "nothing short of torture," she said.
Several doctors testified there was no medical explanation for the spike in Garnett's sodium levels that led to his death.
But defense lawyer Stephen Riebling said there was no "direct evidence" of a crime and drew out from witnesses that Spears seemed devastated by her son's death. He said the hospital video was edited to eliminate tender scenes between mother and son, including one in which she puts two pairs of socks on him.
"If she's planning on killing him, why does she care whether his feet are cold?" he asked the jury.
He also said the hospital was negligent and dehydrated the boy, an assertion Murphy called "ridiculous."
The evidence included two feeding bags found in Spears' apartment that were heavily tainted with salt, including one Spears asked a friend to hide. One bag had the equivalent of 69 McDonald's salt packets in it, a forensic toxicologist testified.
Also in evidence were many of Spears' postings on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and a blog and her online research into the dangers of sodium in children.
Spears, an Alabama native, was living with her son in Chestnut Ridge, New York, when he died. She moved to Kentucky afterward and was living there when she was arrested.
There was no mention at the trial of a disorder known as Munchausen by proxy, in which caretakers secretly harm children to win sympathy. Some experts believe that disorder fits Spears' actions.
Westchester County's Journal News reported in May that the boy's father had never met him but read that he was dying in the hospital. The father, Chris Hill, who lives in Athens, Alabama, sent Spears a friend request on Facebook.
On Jan. 23, 2014, the day the boy died, Hill posted a message on her Facebook page, copying a photo of the boy and saying: "Even though I don't get to see him, I feel like he's been with me this hole time. IM not going to lie. I cried for hours when I found this out, and it will continue to hurt till the day I die."
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