A St Louis woman is going to prison after being sentenced Friday to 78 years for the 'systematic torture' of her children. Lakechia Schonta Stanley, 34, admitted to whipping, beating and waterboarding her three children and faced 34 felonies, including counts of assault and endangering the welfare of a child.
according to dailymail news The abuse came to light in October 2011, when Stanley's then-10-year-old daughter arrived at school with complaints of pain in her arm, reports the St Louis Post-Dispatch. The girl told her school librarian her mother had beaten her with a bat as punishment for not promptly cleaning the kitchen. The librarian found the arm cold to the touch, and when the girl was later treated at the hospital, medical staff found that profound abuse had caused trauma that constricted blood supply to the arm. The girl also confided that her sister, 8, had been beaten with the baseball bat because she had spent too long in the shower.Prosecutors said that Stanley, who along with her husband, Alexander Rui Stanley, 30, had also whipped the girls with electrical cords, left profound physical injuries along with emotional trauma. 'The scarring on these two girls is the worst scarring I have ever seen on children from repeated whippings from objects,' Detective Robert Jauer wrote in a probable cause statement at the time. Prosecutors said that the children were subjected to other beatings and punishments, such as being forced into showers that were freezing or scalding hot, and being waterboarded. 'What the defendant did to three of her own children far exceeds the definition of child abuse and amounts to systematic torture,' wrote assistant circuit attorney Tanja Engelhardt to the judge.
'She was supposed to be their mother, the one person they could trust,' said Engelhardt in the sentencing memorandum. 'Instead she became a symbol of betrayal and fear, using every tool at her disposal to beat and torture her own innocent children.' Alexander Stanley pleaded guilty last year to 42 felony counts and was sentenced to 160 years in prison.
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