A Georgia mother has been sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murdering her two young sons by placing them in an oven and turning it on.
On Friday, Lamora Williams was found guilty of 14 charges including murder, in the deaths of her sons Ke-Yaunte Penn, 2, and Ja’Karter Penn, 1, in October 2017, as per a Daily Mail report.
The 24-year-old mother was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, with an additional 35 years.
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Authorities began investigating Williams after she called 911 and claimed she had returned home from work to find the children dead in her Atlanta apartment.
According to an arrest warrant, Williams told dispatchers that she found the oven on top of Ja’Karter’s head and Ke-Yaunte lying on the floor with severe head trauma.
“When I came in, the stove was laying on my youngest son’s head, and my other son was laid out on the floor with his brains laid out,” Williams said during the 911 call. “I don’t know what to do. I just came home from work”, she said.
A third child, who was three years old at the time was found unharmed in the apartment.
Williams initially claimed that the children had been with a caregiver at the time of their deaths and maintained her innocence. However, investigators determined she had placed the boys in the oven the night before she called 911.
Jameel Penn, the children’s father, told authorities that the Georgia mother video-called him after the incident.
He claimed that during the call, he saw his sons motionless on the floor and immediately reached out to the police.
“I just received a call from my child’s mother that my … two dead babies; my sons are dead in an apartment,” Penn said during his 911 call. “She video called me and I seen it. I really think they are dead.”
In a 2017 interview with WSB-TV, Penn described the scene as “like a real horror movie.”
An autopsy revealed the boys’ heads were found inside a tipped-over oven. While the coroner’s report indicated that the injuries appeared to be from “dry heat and prolonged exposure,” it contradicted police claims that the children were burned alive.
“These thermal changes appear to be entirely from dry heat and changes from prolonged exposure to heat,” the coroner wrote. “It would require an extensive amount of time to get to this degree.”
Although Williams maintained her innocence, prosecutors relied on the findings of the Atlanta Police Department.
The jury found her guilty on all counts, including murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, cruelty to children, concealing the death of another, and giving a false statement.
The Georgia mother sentenced reportedly had a history of mental illness, which her mother attributed to the death of Williams’ father when she was 19 and the stress of being a single mother of four.
Williams’ mother told FOX 5 that she believed her daughter had “snapped” after a breakup with Penn.
