The woman convicted of beating and starving her bedridden 4-year-old daughter to death was sentenced to 32 years in prison last week, but Carlotta Brett-Pierce still claims that she is a doting mom.
“I want people to see I’m a loving and caring mother of three,” Brett-Pierce told a judge right before she was sentenced. “By no means am I a malicious or vindictive person.”
It took a jury about an hour to convict Brett-Pierce for the death of her child Marchella.
Marchella, who was disabled, bedridden, and born with a medical condition that forced her to eat and breathe out of feeding tubes, died on Sept. 2, 2010, allegedly after days of torture at the hands of her mother, prosecutors said.
Police claimed that Brett-Pierce tied her daughter to a bed inside their apartment and battered her with household items. She also allegedly deprived her of food and water.
When Marchella died, she weighed just 18 pounds, prosecutors said, and police found marks on her wrists and ankles, a sign that she had been bound by cords.
Brett-Pierce was charged with murder after an autopsy showed Marchella died of “child abuse syndrome.”
Brett-Pierce’s mother and Marchella’s grandmother, Loretta Brett, was also charged with manslaughter. She, too, was convicted last week and is facing 15 years in prison, prosecutors say.
During the two-week trial, both Brett-Pierce and her 6-year-old son Tymel were called to the stand to recount the days before Marchella died.
Tymel Pierce, who testified via a TV monitor at his mother’s trial, said he didn’t see his mother do anything out of the ordinary.
“No,” Pierce said when prosecutor Perry Cerrato asked him if his mom tied Marchella to the bed.
But when Marchella died, his mother, who he called “my old mommy,” lied about what happened.
“When I woke, my mom said she fell down the stairs,” he said.
Brett-Pierce admitted that her daughter “hot lost weight” in the months before she died.
“To me, at the time, it didn’t look bad,” the mother said of her daughter’s weight. “She looked like a child who wasn’t sitting on her booty in the hospital all day. She was outside running around for the first time in her life.”
District Attorney Charles Hynes also charged two city Administration for Children’s Services workers for allowing the alleged torture to continue by not bothering to follow up on Marchella’s case — a point defense attorney Alan Stutman raised during his opening statements, where he laid most of the blame on city social service agencies who were responsible to check on the child’s condition.
Gioeli: Set me free
Convicted mobster Thomas “Tommy Shots” Gioeli wants a get out of jail free card.
An attorney for the Colombo crime boss filed a letter to the Brooklyn federal judge overseeing the conviction last week, according to the New York Daily News, requesting that Gioeli be set free until his sentencing in the fall.
“It is not reasonable to think that after almost 20 years of freedom without committing a crime, Gioeli would be likely to be a danger in the three months before his sentencing,” Gioeli’s attorney Adam Perlmutter wrote.
No decision on the request had been made by Monday night.
A Brooklyn federal jury acquitted Gioeli and Dino “Little Dino” Saracino of killing Sheepshead Bay cop Ralph Dols, as well as several others, when the verdict was reached on May 9.
Both men were charged with racketeering and are facing 20 years in prison as a result.
Prosecutors claim that Gioeli and Sarcino killed Dols after opening fire on the off-duty cop as he left the apartment he shared with Kimberly Kennaugh, the ex-wife of then-Colombo acting boss Joel Cacace.
Reach reporter Thomas Tracy at ttracy@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-2525.
