“Have you seen these?” Judge Amy Corrigall Jones asked, holding up a photograph showing red burn marks on the buttocks and feet of a 2-year-old Akron girl.
“Yes, ma’am,” answered Monique Smith, the girl’s mother who was about to be sentenced for causing the first- and second-degree burns.
“Have you seen this one?” asked Jones, displaying another photograph.
“Yes, ma’am,” Smith said again, her voice catching.
Jones said she refused to believe Smith’s explanation that the burns were accidental and that she didn’t realize the bath water was too hot when she put her daughter into it last July. Instead, she said the physical and medical evidence — and common sense — support the prosecutor’s explanation that Smith held her daughter down in the 124-degree water for at least two minutes.
“At its most basic level, a mother’s most important role is to protect her children — your innocent baby,” Jones said. “Of all the roles that a parent is to play, that is the most critical.”
Jones told Smith, a mother of five, she was sentencing her to five years in prison. Smith burst into tears.
“Please!” she wailed after deputies put handcuffs on her wrists.
Smith, 27, pleaded guilty May 25 in Summit County Common Pleas Court to felonious assault and child endangering, both second-degree felonies. Under a plea agreement, prosecutors agreed to merge the two offenses and Smith was sentenced on the child endangering charge. She faced two to eight years in prison.
Smith’s daughter was treated at Akron Children’s Hospital on July 11, 2015, for burns to her buttocks and feet. She remained in the hospital for about a week.
Assistant Prosecutor Seema Misra said Smith delayed taking her daughter to the hospital until hours after she was burned. She said the girl, now 3, suffered permanent scars physically and mentally from the incident and continues to undergo counseling. She said Smith failed to show up for two supervised counseling sessions she was supposed to have with her daughter before the sentencing.
“I don’t believe she has taken true ownership for what happened,” Misra said. “None of us was there. We can’t know. All the clues we do have show a mother who was frustrated with her children.”
Walter Madison, Smith’s defense attorney, said Smith is an uneducated single mother with five children who was trying her best to care for them. He said Smith had never before been charged with a violent crime and had never previously been involved with Summit County Children Services involving any of her children, who all remained in her care besides the girl who was burned.
“It’s hard being a parent,” Madison said. “Maybe the stress got the better of her one day.”
Madison urged Jones to consider giving Smith probation, arguing this would be in the best interest of her four children and that she would still need to continue going through the process of regaining custody of her 3-year-old daughter in Summit County Juvenile Court.
Smith told the judge that she moved her daughter back in the tub that morning and adjusted the water when the girl said it was too hot. She denied holding her down in the water.
“That was not true,” she said.
Smith said she took the girl to the hospital as soon as she realized she had been seriously hurt.
Jones, however, told Smith the evidence did not support Smith’s version of what happened.
“It doesn’t make sense because it’s not true,” the judge said.
Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at 330-996-3705 or swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @swarsmithabj and on Facebook: www.facebook.com/swarsmith.