Erin Merdy, 34, pleaded guilty earlier this year to killing her children aged 7, 4 and 3 months in 2022.
NEW YORK — A Brooklyn woman was sentenced Wednesday to 20 years to life in prison for the crime. Drowned her three young children. In the ocean near Coney Island’s famous boardwalk.
Erin Merdy, 34, pleaded guilty earlier this year to first-degree murder charges in the 2022 deaths of her 7-year-old son Zachary, 4-year-old daughter Liliana and 3-month-old son Oliver.
“No sentence can fully measure the loss of a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old and a 3-month-old, or the grief that their loved ones will endure forever,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement, adding that the children’s lives were taken “in the most heartbreaking and unimaginable way.”
Messages left for Murdy’s attorney were not returned.
New York City police received a call from Murdy’s relatives in the early morning of September 12, 2022, worried that she intended to harm her children, and then began a frantic search for the three children.
Police first found the barefoot, soaked mother on a boardwalk two miles from her Coney Island home. She repeatedly said the children were gone and she was sorry, according to prosecutors.
The children’s bodies were found hours later on the Atlantic shoreline, just steps from the boardwalk and about a dozen blocks from the stadium where the Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team plays.
The city medical examiner’s office ruled both deaths homicides and deaths from drowning.
Evidence against Murdie included a video showing her walking to the ocean with her children just before 1 a.m., according to the criminal complaint.
At the time, relatives said she might have suffered from postpartum depression.
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