A Bucks County woman whose unlicensed day treatment was the website of a baby’s death in 2019 was sentenced Tuesday to up to two several years in the county jail all through an psychological listening to in Doylestown.
Lauren Landgrebe, 50, of Upper Southampton, experienced pleaded responsible to involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a boy or girl in the dying of 11-month-previous Victoria Watson. The little one asphyxiated after Landgrebe placed her in a car seat that was improperly secured.
In sentencing Landgrebe to jail, President Decide Wallace H. Bateman chastised her for leaving the the infant strapped into a car or truck seat in the dining area of her house and leaving the place.
“She left a child in a car or truck seat, like the centerpiece on a table, even though she sunned herself by the pool,” he said. “It’s difficult to imagine the callousness of that act.”
Bateman sentenced Landgrebe to a single day considerably less than a year to just one working day less than two decades in jail, adopted by 10 years’ probation — a expression agreed on by prosecutors and her defense attorney.
Landgrebe’s attorney, Louis Busico, explained following the hearing that the sentence was “in the fascination of justice.” Continue to, Busico said he recognized the agony of the Watson family’s loss.
“Undoubtedly, the criminal justice program is not effectively equipped to make folks total,” he stated.
Law enforcement ended up named to Landgrebe’s household in August 2019 for a report of an unresponsive infant. There, they identified Victoria in the automobile seat, chilly to the contact. She was later pronounced dead at Abington Healthcare facility, the place she had been born months earlier.
Landgrebe informed detectives she put the infant in the vehicle seat and propped a bottle up subsequent to her applying a towel, something she experienced done numerous instances prior to, according to the affidavit of probable lead to for her arrest. As the baby slept, Landgrebe went outdoors with two other children she was looking at, and checked again in on the little one only once.
» Go through Far more: Bucks County woman charged in loss of life of infant at unlicensed working day care
She sent a photo of the child sleeping with the bottle subsequent to her by Snapchat, joking to a good friend that the lady had “a tough evening.” Several hours later, immediately after her spouse named the police simply because the little one experienced stopped respiratory, Landgrebe deleted that picture, the affidavit mentioned.
Victoria’s mothers and fathers, aunts, uncles and grandparents took turns addressing Bateman during Tuesday’s hearing, each and every describing the pleasure she experienced brought them in her shorter existence as properly as the insurmountable grief they’ve experienced to wrestle with in the years because her demise.
“We’ve all seasoned tragic events in daily life,” Michael Watson, Victoria’s father, explained. “This was 100% preventable, and that’s what can make this so tricky. The person who should’ve gotten the most attention acquired the the very least.”
Watson referred to as himself a shell of his previous self, unable to rely on persons and having difficulties to come across joy in lifestyle.
His spouse, Marita, reported her existence adjusted eternally on the working day her daughter died right after becoming “left on a desk as an afterthought.”
“My kids go through the most, because they don’t get the most effective versions of us,” she mentioned, incorporating that she never ever imagined her daughter would grow to be “a cautionary tale” for other mom and dad to learn from.
“This could have been any youngster,” she stated. “Unfortunately, it was our kid, and we have to live with the outcome.”