Garnett died at Westchester Medical Centre, New York, after he was treated for gastrointestinal symptoms that his mother had induced.
His feeding tube had been in place since infancy when Spears told doctors he could not keep food down. When she took him to hospital saying he was having seizures, doctors found his sodium levels to be extremely high.
The prosecution said that having administered him salt at their home in suburban New York, she twice took Garnett into a bathroom at the hospital to do the same. Video showed Spears twice taking the boy into a hospital bathroom with a connector tube and the boy suffering afterward.
Much of Garnett Spears’s young life was spent seeking medical attention for often unexplained health issues.
Lacey Spears – He was in and out of the hospital for the first nine weeks of his life. And the biggest problem that we had was we couldn’t get him to eat. So he was losing weight.
Garnett had surgery at 9 months old to insert feeding tube.
Lacey Spears – We were hopeful that within time, he wouldn’t have so much problems eating.
In January 2014, 5-year-old, Garnett was taken again to a hospital. He was admitted with seizure-like symptoms. Later, during the hospital stay, Garnett is in distress. Stops breathing. And test showed high levels of sodium, which caused his brain to swell.
Lacey Spears – Does is my 5-year-old son on life support?
Two days later Garnett is officially declared dead. Doctors could not figure out how his sodium levels had gotten so high, unless someone had given him salt.
Five months after Garnett’s death, Lacey Spears was charged with murder.
Lacey Spears – I didn’t kill my son. I never poisoned him with salt. – Then why is his sodium levels so high? – You would have to ask the hospital that.
Investigators recovered two feeding bags from Lacey’s apartment. There was a gap in the chain of custody. But when they did the analysis of the bags, they found toxic levels of sodium. The equivalent of 69 small salt packs, that you would get at the fast food restaurant, in both of the bags. Enough to obviously cause great damage to this little boy. And his brain swelled. And that led to his death.
Spears had told investigators that her son, whose father was killed in a car accident, suffered from a number of medical problems from Crohn’s disease and Celiac diseases to ear abnormalities. She lied that Garnett’s father died in a car accident.
Lacey Spears chronicled her son Garnett’s illnesses on a personal blog called Garnett’s Journey and other social media. Prosecutors said Spears loaded the hospitalized boy’s feeding tube with a lethal amount of salt and kept on blogging. “She used that feeding tube as a weapon to kill him.”
The defense portrayed Spears as a caring mother and her son as sickly, but the prosecution argued that Spears reveled in the attention Garnett’s illness brought her. He also said the hospital was negligent and dehydrated the boy.
Her defense lawyers had refused to raise the disorder as a defense and said she had not been diagnosed with any mental illness. They had asked for the minimum sentence of 15 years.
Acting state supreme court justice Robert Neary called Spears’ crime “unfathomable in its cruelty”, bringing Garnett “five years of torment and pain”.
She was convicted of second-degree murder, because in the state of New York second-degree murder is similar to what other states designate as first-degree murder. In order to be charged with first-degree murder in New York a crime must involve an aggravating factor like killing a police officer or murder for hire.
“Throughout his five years, Garnett Spears was forced to suffer through repeated hospitalizations, unneeded surgical procedures and ultimately poisoning with salt, all at the hands of the one person who should have been his ultimate protector – his mother,” Westchester district attorney spokeswoman Janet DiFiore said after Spears was convicted.
Three years before she was charged with poisoning her son to death with salt, Lacey Spears was investigated by Florida child welfare authorities after complaints that she was medically neglecting her then 2-year-old son and would slap him till he cried.
“Mom will slap him for no reason as hard as she can. He begins to cry and then she begins to love on him,” according to an allegation made to Florida’s Department of Children and Families.
That complaint in June 2011, the first of two that year against Spears while she lived in Clearwater, also accused the single mother of taking Garnett swimming with his eyes and ears bleeding, and taking him on outings with high-grade fevers. Investigators did not find any marks or bruising on Garnett, and Spears denied all allegations of neglect and abuse. The agency classified Garnett as being at “intermediate risk” because of his age and troubled medical history, but closed the case with no follow-up services ordered.
Little boy was tortured all his life. He died in tremendous pain.
His mother, Lacey Spears, suffers from Factitious disorder imposed on another (Factitious disorder by proxy), previously called Münchausen syndrome by proxy.
