"Mom convicted of killing son, 5, by poisoning him with salt" Associated Press March 03, 2015
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A woman who blogged for years about her son’s constant health woes was convicted Monday of poisoning him to death by force-feeding heavy concentrations of sodium through his stomach tube.
A jury in the New York suburbs found Lacey Spears, of Scottsville, Ky., guilty of second-degree murder in the death last year of 5-year-old Garnett-Paul Spears.
Spears, an Alabama native, was living with her son in Chestnut Ridge, N.Y., when he died. She moved to Kentucky afterward and was living there when she was arrested.
The defense portrayed Spears as a caring mother and her son as sickly, but the prosecution argued that Spears reveled in the attention that the boy’s illness brought her. Video showed Spears twice taking the boy into a bathroom with a connector tube and the boy 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.
Several doctors testified that there was no medical explanation for the spike in the boy’s sodium levels that led to his death.
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