April 24, 2018
Jeffery Allen Brown, 35, was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Friday for stomping his girlfriend’s toddler to death three years ago.
Brown, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last year in the death of 2-year-old Brianna Sandy on Jan. 28, 2015.
Prosecutors said that Brown — who lived with Brianna’s mother was in a recliner playing a video game when the toddler vomited on him.
Deputy Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Pam Jones said Brown then grabbed Brianna by the neck, threw her on the floor, and stomped her in the abdomen with a work boot. A police detective said Brown admitted to one kick.
Brianna soon told her mother she wasn’t feeling well. “She was complaining about her tummy hurting,” Jones said. “He never said one word.”
Before leaving for work at a construction job the next morning, Brown kissed the toddler on the forehead, telling her he loved her and hoped she felt better — still not mentioning the foot stomp to his girlfriend.
“She was bleeding internally,” Jones said of Brianna. “She suffocated. She drowned in her own blood.”
The 2-year-old’s mother, Erika Gilbert, found her daughter unresponsive at 7:04 a.m. and called 911. Hampton paramedics began CPR, but Brianna was in cardiac arrest and died of internal injuries an hour later. The State Medical Examiner’s Office said the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the abdomen.
Brown was charged with child abuse and felony homicide.
Brown pleaded guilty to the murder in April 2017, with the child abuse charge dropped as part of the plea agreement. He faced up to 40 years in prison, even as discretionary state sentencing guidelines — based on a defendant’s prior criminal record, age and other factors — called for a sentence of between 12 and 21 years.
Two prosecutors — Jones and Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Adrienne Mauney — asked Circuit Court Judge Christopher W. Hutton for the 40-year maximum.
“To say, ‘I love you and I hope you feel better’ when she was struggling to breathe — less than an hour before she takes her final breath — it’s so inexcusable,” Jones said Monday. “I found that appalling.”
Jones said she was also astounded by something Brown wrote in an 80-page statement he submitted to the judge. Brown wrote in part that Brianna “no longer has to suffer through all the trials and tribulations” of life, and is “forever experiencing the love and joy we here on earth can’t even possibly imagine with God in heaven.”
“The audacity of him to say that to the judge when he was responsible for taking her life,” Jones told the Daily Press Monday. “She wasn’t dying from some disease. He killed her.”
Brown’s lawyer, Andrew Protogyrou, asked for a prison sentence of between 10 to 12 years — just below the low end of the state guidelines — “because it was an accident.”
Protogyrou said that Brianna's mother, Gilbert, testified Friday about the pain of her daughter’s loss. But Gilbert also testified that “she knew it must have been an accident, because he had never struck the child,” Protogyrou said. “She said he did not have a temper, never hit the children, interacted well with the family.”
Brown didn’t have a prior criminal record. He wrote in his letter that he was “terrified” of telling Gilbert about the foot stomp, and acknowledged Friday that he “acted cowardly” in failing to tell her.
Before being sentenced, Brown apologized to Brianna’s relatives, but said he knew “he would be OK” no matter the sentence because he had found salvation in Jesus Christ while locked up.
In the end, Judge Hutton sided with prosecutors, sentencing Brown to 40 years to serve. “No child deserves to be shaken, and no child deserves to be stomped,” Jones quoted Hutton as saying at the hearing.
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