Crime
Mother Who Burned Daughter Gets Harsh Words from Judge and 17 Years
- Monday, June 06, 2011 5:36 PM
NEW YORK, USA - The woman who plead guilty for setting her six-year-old daughter on fire during a Vodou ritual was sentenced to 17 years behind bars by a Queens County judge.
Marie Lauradin, 29, set her daughter, Frantzcia Saintil, on fire in a ritual called "Loa." Previously she had denied the incident in a pre-sentencing report, saying she was "rubbing [Frantzcia] down with alcohol because she was sick with fever when a nearby candle fell and set her on fire.""I’m giving you another opportunity to tell the truth," Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter told Lauradin.
"Did you douse your child with accelerant and light her on fire?" the judge said.
"Yes," she said through an interpreter.
"The only demonic presence this child had to worry about was her mother," the judge said.
According to the New York Post , Lauradin originally told police that she was cooking rice on the stove inside her Queens Village home on Feb. 4, 2009, and when she was moving the pot to a back burner as Frantzcia approached her from behind and hit her hand, causing her to spill the pot of boiling water on the child.
"This was a barbaric act not an accident," the judge said. "The victim loves her mother dearly ... she still wants to be loved by this terrible excuse of a mother."
Little Frantzcia’s horrific injuries — some of them permanent — didn’t match her mother’s story.
"She has so much anger and suffers at school from kids making fun of her," prosecutor Leigh Bishop read from an email sent from Frantzcia’s foster mother, Sunday Cruz.
Frantzia's grandmother, Sylvenie Thessier, 70, stood by while 25 percent of her granddaughter’s body was covered with second- and third-degree burns — including her face.
Thessier pleaded guilty to reckless assault earlier this year and was sentenced in April to 3 years in prison.
Both Lauradin and Thessier face deportation upon completion of their sentences.
Related 05.19.2011: Woman Admits to Setting 6 Year Old Daughter on Fire
Related 03.24.2011: Grandmother Facing 3 Years for Child Burning Ritual
Related 02.26.2011: Voodoo Sex Ceremony Blamed for Fatal Fire in NY
Related 01.31.2011: Four Year Old Dies of Alcohol Poisoning
Source: New York Post
