Plea deal: St. Louis woman gets 5 years in prison for infant son’s starvation death
03/10/2021 5:12 pm PST
ST. LOUIS (TCD) --
A Missouri woman was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday after taking a plea deal in the starvation death of her infant son in 2018.
Makayla Hill, 27, pleaded guilty to child endangerment in exchange for prosecutors’ agreement to drop second-degree murder charges and reduce the charge of child abuse resulting in death.
Hill called police from The Lodge Hotel in Bridgeton, Missouri, where she was living at the time, on Sunday, Sept. 2, 2018. Officers found her 2-and-a-half-month-old son, who was unresponsive, and her other child, a toddler, in the room with Hill.
The infant was immediately hospitalized, where he was pronounced dead from severe malnourishment. He weighed six pounds.
Prosecutors said Hill did not feed the infant for about 12 hours before she found him unresponsive.
Missouri Circuit Attorney Jerome McDonald said when the boy was about six weeks old, he had been hospitalized for vomiting blood and having trouble breathing.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports Makayla Hill’s husband had assaulted her a week prior to the child’s death, and she had been placed at the Lodge Hotel by a woman’s shelter.
Hill's attorney Josh Lohn said if they had gone to trial, he would have brought an expert witness to testify the infant had a rare congenital disorder that could have prevented him from crying when he was hungry or thirsty, or could have caused him to reject nourishment.
Hill told the judge Tuesday from the St. Louis County jail that she has been previously diagnosed with postpartum depression, the Post-Dispatch reports.
Hill received credit for more than two years’ jail time served in her sentencing Tuesday, according to the Post-Dispatch.
MORE:
