An East Haven, Connecticut mother, LeRoya Moore sentenced 120 years jail for killing her two kids saying it was ‘God’s plan.’ Had claimed insanity and mental illness as defense.
A Connecticut mother who killed her two children saying it was ’God’s plan’ has been sentenced to 120 years in jail without the possibility of parole.
LeRoya Moore, 39, was sentenced Thursday, following her guilty conviction in March of two counts of murder for killing her 6-year-old daughter, Aleisha, and her 7-year-old son, Daaron, at the family’s home in East Haven in 2015. For each count of murder, she received 60 years WTNH reported.
‘It’s a no win today, the sentence reflects the seriousness of the crimes but the children are still gone,’ New Haven State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin said.
Adding, ‘They were victims of a monumental act of betrayal.’
For career jurists, Griffin said ‘this case stands apart’ and described Moore’s crime as ‘an unmitigated act of savagery.’ Griffin urged the judges to impose the maximum sentence.
Moore’s attorneys tried to use an insanity defense, saying she was in a psychotic state at the time but the three-judge panel rejected the defense in March.
Autopsies showed the children died from antihistamine intoxication, but a defense psychiatrist said Moore told him she drowned them while trying to ‘baptize them’ after God told her she had to kill them. She also stayed in the house for three days with the bodies telling the police she ‘saved them.’
A Yale psychiatry professor testified at trial that Moore suffered from schizoaffective disorder during the killings and still suffered from it. Her defense claimed the mother had since been stabilized upon using medications and that she had been ‘insane’ at the time of the drownings. It wasn’t clear if the mother had been diagnosed prior to the murders and whether she was on medications at the time.
East Haven mother was motivated by anger towards her ex husband and deliberately set out to murder the couple’s children the prosecution argued:
The prosecution argued that Moore was sane, saying she was motivated by anger toward her ex-husband, Michael Moore, the father of Aleisha and Daaron.
In a statement read in court by a victims’ advocate, Michael Moore said the lives of his son and daughter were ‘cut oh so short by LeRoya, a woman they were born to trust.’
He said he trusted her to take care of them and that if she needed help, had options like sisters, aunts and others who could take the children.
The pair had divorced in 2012 and shared custody of the children. At one point the mother was arrested assaulting the children’s father post divorce.
Leading into her sentencing, Moore told the three-judge panel that she, ‘still had trouble understanding what happened’. She reflected on trauma she said she suffered when she was young and her struggles as a single mother.
‘For me, the most challenging part of understanding this outcome is I love my children. I love my children, all of them,’ the mother said moments before finding out her fate.
‘I still don’t know how I could be so sick and something so devastating could happen to my family,’ she said.
Moore will serve the sentences consecutively at York Correctional Institution, where she is housed now in East Lyme.
LEROYA MOORE SENTENCING: Her two children died of antihistamine intoxication in late May of 2015. The Department of Children and Families had been investigating Moore since 1997 and had removed the three oldest of her five children from her home.
— Tony Terzi (@T2Fox61) June 27, 2019
LEROYA MOORE SENTENCING: after numerous victims impact statements, Moore spoke for 35 minutes. She stated she felt killing her children was something she needed to do to “save them from the same fate I suffered as a child.” Brief recess now. Sentencing shortly. @FOX61News
— Tony Terzi (@T2Fox61) June 27, 2019
