KENTON BROWN - 2 yo - / Convicted: Mollie Shouse, mother - Louisville KY

Kentucky mom convicted of murder after leaving toddler to die in hot car while she went inside and got high

Mollie
Shouse, 29, was convicted of murder in a Kentucky court for leaving her
son, Kenton, 2, to die in a hot car while she was inside, passed out
from Xanax and pot.


NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Wednesday, August 8, 2012, 11:35 AM



WDRB

A
jury recommended a 35-year sentence for Louisville mother Mollie
Shouse, 29, after finding her guilty of murder and other charges for the
May 2011 death of her 2-year-old son, Kenton Brown.

A
Kentucky woman was convicted of murder Tuesday for leaving her
2-year-old son to die in a hot car while she was inside her apartment,
passed out in a drug-addled stupor.

“[He was] too little to
unbuckle his car seat,” prosecutor Erin McKenzie said in a Jefferson
County court on Tuesday. “He sat in there and suffered while mom slept
off a good buzz, and temperatures in the car reached horrifying
heights.”

A jury found Mollie Shouse, 29, guilty of wanton murder
and recommended a 35-year prison sentence for the death last summer of
her son Kenton Brown, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky. reports.

Shouse was also found guilty of criminal abuse and possession of a controlled substance.

Prosecutors
say she took her son to buy drugs last May and left him in the car when
she returned home, went inside and got high on Xanax and marijuana.

“This
was a woman who had a habit of this,” McKenzie told jurors in court,
according to the newspaper. “That car seat was her babysitter.”

Shouse
says she doesn’t remember anything after coming home — until 12 hours
later, when her mother woke her, trying to find the boy.

Police say the temperature in the car had reached 130 degrees.

When they arrived, Kenton had already been taken out of the car by neighbors who unsuccessfully tried to revive him.

An attorney for Shouse argued that the boy’s death was an accident.

“She
is a very nice young woman who made a mistake,” Patti Eschner said in
court. “It was the worst day of her life. She will punish herself more
than any jury can.”

Eschner says her client, a single mother, told jurors that being a drug addict does not make her a murderer.

“She
is not the selfish, cold, calculated monster that they’re going to try
to make you think that she is,” Eschner said Tuesday. “Mollie’s human,
she made a terrible, terrible mistake.”

Prosecutors believe Shouse’s murder conviction was the first in Jefferson County related to the death of a child in a hot car.

Juror Stephen Jones said the jury felt Shouse had “an indifference for human life.”

“I know she lost a child,” Jones told WDRB. “But, oh my God, she didn’t show much remorse.”

Shouse will be formally sentenced in September.


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/kentucky-mom-convicted-murder-leaving-tot-die-hot-car-high-article-1.1131519#ixzz22yLNHyd6