Ohio Adoptive Mother Has Adoptive Father Killed by Adoptive Son
Yep!
“An Ohio mother accused of convincing her then 10-year-old adoptive son to shoot his father dead has accepted a plea deal after winning the right to a new trial.
Judith Hawkey, 52, had been scheduled to go on trial this week in the mysterious 2003 shooting death of her husband. But instead, she entered an Alford plea to involuntary manslaughter and child endangering charges.
The plea means she did not admit guilt, but acknowledged prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her.
Last week a judge sentenced her to 10 years in prison, including the more than five she already has served.
Defiance County Prosecutor Morris Murray said Tuesday that he agreed to the plea deal because he wanted to make sure his office secured a conviction tying Hawkey to her husband’s death.
‘We felt strongly she was definitely involved and had a substantial influence over the child,’ he said. ‘There was no question this was not an accidental shooting.’
Several factors, including the appeals court ruling, would have made getting a second conviction more difficult, he said.
In 2016 a state appeals court ordered a second trial for Hawkey because it said testimony shouldn’t have been allowed from three witnesses.
The appeals court judges said there was enough evidence for a conviction at Hawkey’s first trial, but they also called the case a not overwhelming one – saying everything originated from her adopted son, Corey Breininger.
It was the son who came home from elementary school in 2003 and fired the shot that killed his father, Robert Breininger, at their house outside Defiance, near the Indiana state line.
The shooting initially was ruled an accident and stayed that way for nearly a decade until Corey Breininger told a former teacher, and then investigators, that Hawkey persuaded him to kill his father because he was dying and to make it look like an accident.
What isn’t in dispute is that Corey came home from school in autumn 2003 and fired the shot that killed his father after Hawkey had left their house outside Defiance, near the Indiana state line.
Corey told first responders he was talking with his dad when the gun went off. He said he tried CPR, but paramedics saw no blood on him.
Nine years later, Corey, told the same investigator a new story.
Hawkey had told him, he said, that his 34-year-old father had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and wanted to be killed so the family would have money. Corey said she told him where to find the gun and how to call 911 when it was over.
Corey Breininger was never charged in the case.
A jury convicted Hawkey of aggravated murder and insurance fraud in 2013 and she was sentenced to life in prison. Authorities had concluded that Hawkey used the boy to kill her husband and collect a $500,000 insurance payout, noting later that she had started the paperwork the day after the shooting.
But Hawkey’s attorneys argued there were many inconsistencies in Corey Breininger’s story.
Among the issues raised was that he told an investigator that Hawkey had beaten him for years and that she had tried to kill him several times.
Hawkey’s former defense attorney said that a social worker who visited the house before the shooting saw no signs of abuse and that medical records did not back up those claims.
Before Hawkey was sentenced in 2013, she said Corey Breininger shot his father because they had decided to send him to a military school and he didn’t want to go.
‘He made up the whole story,’ she said then. ‘I will be back for another time because I did not do this.’
Hawkey’s attorney declined to comment.
Corey posted on Facebook that he had been ‘ready to fight’ her again, adding: ‘I already made the promise that as long as I had a breathe I would fight to keep her behind bars.'”
[Daily Mail 3/5/19 by Lauren Fruen and AP]
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