A Minnesota mother called the judge “garbage” as she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole following her conviction for shooting her six-year-old son dead.
“I’m innocent. F*** you all. You’re garbage. That is all, your honour,” Julissa Thaler said during her sentencing hearing on Thursday, per a Fox9 report.
She was detained and charged with first- and second-degree murder after the death of her son Eli Hart in May of last year. She had been granted full custody of the child ten days previously after splitting with the father.
Prosecutors said that Thaler used a shotgun to shoot Eli nine times, Law & Crime reported.
Reacting to the diatribe, Hennepin County District Judge Jay Quam said, “Ms Thaler, I don’t know if that’s appropriate here”.
“Sorry, I told you what somebody else can’t,” the 29-year-old responded.
While reading the sentence, Judge Quam said: “The worst thing that seems to happen to parents is to lose their child. It’s worse, though, when you don’t lose your child to something like cancer or an accident, it’s when someone takes that child from the world. What I can’t imagine, nobody can imagine, is that the person that takes the child from the world is the person that brought that child in. Nothing I do would bring justice to this situation. Nothing I do would relieve any of the pain that you caused by doing that.”
During the sentencing, Thaler appeared to give the gallery and the judge the finger.
Police in Orono, west of Minneapolis, pulled Thaler over after receiving reports of an individual driving without a tire and with a destroyed back window on 20 May of last year. When they conducted a traffic stop, police found that Thaler had flesh pieces on her and that there was blood in her car.
She claimed the blood was from a tampon and that the flesh was from a deer that she had purchased from a butcher, KMSP reported last year.
After about half an hour, police escorted Thaler home. They later found the body of Eli in the trunk next to a shotgun.
Ten days before Eli’s death, Thaler had won full custody. The child’s father, Tory Hart, had made several complaints regarding the mother’s previous drug use and mental health issues.
Thaler reportedly asked gun shop staff for the ammunition that would “blow the biggest hole,” according to CBS News.
The authorities have said that Eli was shot in his mother’s vehicle at a Lake Minnetonka Regional Park parking lot in Minnetrista. Police found the body during the 20 May traffic stop.
Defence lawyer Bryan Leary argued during closing arguments that Thaler wasn’t the person who shot Eli, adding that there were no witnesses, images or footage that linked her to the death, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
“She’s not charged with the crime they have proved,” Mr Leary said. “She destroyed evidence, lied to police, ran away, but they have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the gun was in her hands when it was fired nine times into her son.”
Thaler didn’t testify and no witnesses were called to speak on her behalf, CBS News noted.
Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Dan Allard argued that the evidence against her was overwhelming, noting that cellphone data connected her to the places involved in the killing. He said she killed the child to either get life insurance money, because of her mental health struggles, or because of the stressful fight over custody.
Mr Hart has filed a wrongful death lawsuit, claiming that custody workers missed warning signs.
Police visited Tahler’s home in Farmington 21 times over ten months, according to files obtained by the Star Tribune. She was arrested after stealing drugs from a clinic and she switched to a new drug testing facility following behaviour considered “bizarre”. She lost custody of her son twice, once in 2020 and then again in 2021.
An ex-boyfriend of Thaler, Robert Pikkarainen, told the court that she and Eli argued the evening before his death because he didn’t want to go to sleep. He said she left the apartment and placed a shotgun, that she had recently bought, into her car. She grabbed Eli and went downstairs, Mr Pikkarainen testified.
He fell asleep, asking her the following morning where she had gone.
“She was kind of like, ‘I had to go do something,’” he said, according to CBS.
The traffic stop occurred later that day. After escorting her home, police found the body in a blanket.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement following the verdict that “Eli’s brutal murder is one of the most horrific cases I have encountered in 30 years working in the criminal legal system. Nothing will ever fill the emptiness Eli’s father and other loved ones now live with every day, but I’m hopeful this verdict will make it just a bit easier to remember Eli as the toothless, happy, smiling little boy we have seen in photos”.
