WIS News 10 - Columbia, South Carolina | Fmr. daycare owner guilty in suffocation case, sentenced to 22 years
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By Jody Barr - email
COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - A Midlands woman has been found guilty of suffocating a one-year-old boy inside her daycare in 1998.
It took only an hour and a half for the six-man, six-woman Richland County jury to find Andrea Person guilty of using her hand to suffocate a one-year-old baby inside her Columbia daycare.
With the weight of a life sentence hanging over her, Person walked into court Friday ready to face a jury's decision.
Person's defense team argued all week that a written confession Person gave investigators in 2007 wasn't voluntary. Instead, they said it came from slick interrogative tactics.
The jury didn't buy it.
Person sat emotionless, as she did all week, as the jury's verdict was announced. That wasn't the case for Person's family.
Prosecutors told the jury all week that Person convicted herself in 2007 when she told three different investigators she suffocated one year old Zach Ulengchong.
"I know this is going to change things in my life, my friends, but it is the right thing to do," Person wrote in a letter to the Ulengchong family.
Person's defense team argued all week Person was a victim of investigators and a coordinated plan to pin the homicide charge on her.
Prosecutors reminded the jury what buying into that theory would mean.
"To come back not guilty, you will have to believe it is the grandest conspiracy in the history of Richland County," said a prosecutor.
The judge sentenced Andrea Person to 22 years in prison. She faced a maximum of life.
Person will spend the next few days at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center waiting for a cell at a Department of Corrections facility.
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