Shanquilla Garvey, Illinois mom sentenced to 35 years jail for beating 8 month old daughter, Cherish Freeman to death cause she wouldn’t stop crying.
An Illinois mother was sentenced to 35 years jail for beating her 8-month-old daughter to death on account of the infant wouldn’t stop crying.
Appearing in court last week, Shanquilla Garvey, 30, pleaded guilty to first degree murder in the death of Cherish Freeman on December 20, 2017.
Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow in a released statement said that Garvey was living at the Bel-Air Motel in Joliet at the time with Cherish and two other children. Cherish was crying and wouldn’t stop, with the young girl’s mom throwing baby Cherish into a dresser, picking her up and shaking her, before then throwing the girl onto the floor.
Blunt force trauma death
When Cherish became unresponsive, Garvey called 911, with the baby rushed to Ascension Saint Joseph Hospital in Joliet, then airlifted to Advocate Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn.
Doctors found two skull fractures, bleeding on the brain, and a liver laceration. The baby girl died from blunt force trauma four days later.
‘For a mother to beat her own baby to death is incomprehensible,’ Glasgow said. ‘Cherish was taken from this earth simply because Shanquilla Garvey wanted her to stop crying. This precious baby girl’s last experience was one of trauma and suffering, something no prison sentence can ever undo.’
At the time of Cherish’s death, Garvey had been living with three of her children at the motel since October of 2017, despite the protests of Cherish’s father who had petitioned the entity for not releasing Cherish in his care upon attaining a job.
‘I love my daughter and I miss her dearly,’ Cherish’s father, Justin Freeman, told WLS-TV in 2018. ‘This shouldn’t have happened to her.’
At the time, the father had lambasted a program that was an alternative to foster care refusing to release his daughter to his custody, only to release the child to her mother, who eventually was charged with the girl’s murder.
Prior to her incarceration, Garvey had limited interaction with the legal system, having faced misdemeanor crimes of theft and stealing checks in 2011 and 2012, Patch reported.
As part of her sentencing, Garvey cannot be paroled, although she will receive 2,377 days for time served and then have three years supervised release after her term is over.
