A 12-year-old Long Island girl – charged with killing her mom in a fight – has been released from custody to begin a new life after authorities decided she acted in self-defense, her lawyer said yesterday.
The girl, whose name was withheld, admitted to criminally negligent homicide for failing to get help sooner for her intoxicated mother last May.
“My mother would come home each evening and drink beer and become nasty and mean towards my sister and me,” the girl wrote to the judge.
When her mom “put her knee on my chest, so that I couldn’t hardly breathe, I told her how much it hurt. I pushed her off me and we fell off the bed and onto the floor and she slammed my forehead against something.
“She was tossing us both around in the sheets and I noticed that she wasn’t breathing right . . . I said ‘Mom, are you OK?’ before going for help.”
The popular seventh-grade honors student was sentenced to two years’ probation and released to her dad, who has taken her to live in Pennsylvania with him, said her lawyer, Oscar Michelen.
The maximum sentence could have been five years in a detention facility.
“Her mother was intoxicated and was taking medication that increased the intoxication,” said Michelen.
“Her daughter was on her bed and the mother put her knees on her daughter’s chest, while she was ripping stuff off the wall” in their Freeport apartment, said Michelen.
The girl “said ‘Get off of me!’ and pushed her off, pushing up on her mom’s neck,” said Michelen.
“She didn’t kill her mother – she defended herself and her mom died in the process” from accidental “neck compression,” according to an autopsy.
The 5-foot-tall suspect admitted to criminally negligent homicide for failing to promptly get help for her dying mother, who had more than twice the legal amount of alcohol in her system.