A 22-year-old sorority girl who murdered her child immediately after birth was sentenced to life in prison without parole this week. One of her sorority sisters heard her child’s cries snuffed out, and another sister found the baby’s dead body in a discarded trash bag.
“No more baby,” Ohio college student Emile Weaver texted the man she thought was the child’s father, the New York Daily News reported. In the same chat, she added, “Taken care of. Don’t worry about it.”
Weaver, a student at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio, had kept her pregnancy a secret and allegedly tried multiple times to kill the baby during pregnancy. Her sisters in the Delta Gamma Theta sorority noticed her weight gain, her secrecy, and then even more worrying behavior. Weaver began drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, and (purposefully?) falling on her stomach during a dodgeball tournament — seemingly in order to endanger the child she was carrying.
Weaver visited the university’s wellness center to obtain birth control in September 2014, but the center required her to take a pregnancy test first. She tested positive, and the center called her, left voice mails, and sent text messages, but Weaver never responded. The girl later claimed in court that she had been in denial about the pregnancy.
On the morning of May 22, 2015, Delta Gamma Theta sister Moriah Saer woke up early and heard a terrifying sound. “Three or four cries … each about three seconds,” Saer later testified. “It sounded like a dying cat.”
A toilet in the sorority house was covered in blood. The house manager assumed it was a feminine hygiene issue and texted the girls, asking whoever was responsible to clean it up. “It looks like a murder scene,” she wrote.
Madison Bates, another sorority sister, wondered if Weaver had given birth and thrown the baby away. Her sisters “kind of thought it was a ridiculous idea, but Elise said she would go look, and I said I would go with her.”
Bates and Elise Zimmerman found the dumpster empty, but a trash bag alone on the ground. “Something wasn’t right. … It was heavy,” Zimmerman testified in court. After ripping the bag open, Bates saw the baby’s foot.
When Zimmerman looked again later, she collapsed into tears. “She said she saw a baby,” Bates testified. “She said: ‘It has hair and eyes.'”
Weaver knew what she had done that night, and her conversation with the man she thought was the baby’s father confirmed it. From The Washington Post:
“No more baby,” Weaver texted the man shortly after disposing of the newborn.
“What,” he replied.
“No more baby,” she texted again.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Taken care of,” she answered, according to the New York Daily News. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I would like to know how you killed my kid,” he wrote.
This exchange proved vital to the final sentence.
Next Page: How Weaver was sentenced to life in prison.
A few days after the murder, a Twitter account seemingly connected to Weaver sent this message:
Goodbyes are not always bad,sometimes there just what you need in your life.
— Emile Weaver! (@EmileWeaver) June 11, 2015
Weaver’s trial began this May, slightly over one year after the fateful day of her child’s death. Aaron Miller, her defense attorney, argued the girl did not know she was pregnant and that the baby could have been stillborn or died through natural causes shortly after birth. He shot for “reasonable doubt” about whether or not she killed the baby.
Prosecutors shot back that Weaver knew she was pregnant. They presented scientific evidence that the child — who has been named Addison — was healthy and had taken several breaths after birth. Addison died of asphyxiation after Weaver put her in the plastic trash bag, they argued.
The jury found Weaver guilty of aggravated murder, abuse of a corpse, and two counts of tampering with evidence.
During the sentencing, Weaver’s former sorority sisters testified on how they had been traumatized by their experiences that day.
Weaver’s defense attorney argued the girl deserved the chance for parole after 20 years in prison, saying she was sorry for what she did. “I stand before you a broken-down woman, asking for forgiveness and mercy,” a tearful Weaver declared. “Words cannot express how sorry I am to my beautiful daughter Addison.”
Muskingum County Common Pleas Judge Mark Fleegle would have none of it. “You tried over and over to take that baby’s life,” he declared, pointing to the alcohol, drugs, and birth-inducing black cohosh supplements Weaver had taken.
Fleegle also cited her text to the assumed father as “probably the most truthful statement you made that day.” Damningly, he added, “It was an inconvenience, and you took care of it.”
He then pointed to her letter to the court, in which she begged for the minimum sentence. “In those four paragraphs, you mention ‘I’ 15 times,” the judge declared. “Once again, it’s all about you.”
Fleegle sentenced Weaver to life in prison without parole.
This sentence stands in sharp contrast to another similar case from the same school — that of Muskingum student Jennifer “Nikki” Bryant, who was even represented by the same defense lawyer! In 2002, Bryant wrapped her baby in a blanket and left the child in a trash can to die. She pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter, child endangerment, and abuse of a corpse.
Bryant was sentenced to three years in prison, but only served seven months. At the time, prosecutor D. Michael Haddox warned that Bryant’s early release would send the wrong message to girls in a similar situation.
After Weaver’s sentencing, Haddox told the Associated Press he was much happier with the second of the two eerily similar trials. “We believe justice has been served as best as humanly possible,” he said.
Weaver said she plans to appeal her life sentence.
Next Page: What does this case mean for abortion and “abortion rights?”
This tragic and horrifying case reinforces the evil of infanticide, and has led many to wonder why it is so strikingly different from the “abortion rights” liberals now proclaim, which featured prominently in a Supreme Court decision this week.
As The Blaze‘s Matt Walsh asked, “Why is a woman sitting in prison for killing a baby in the same country that proclaims baby murder as the sacred right of all women?” He compared Weaver with Chelsea Handler, a woman who recently received a great deal of feminist praise after proclaiming she was proud of her abortions in a Playboy magazine article.
“What are the actual moral and scientific differences between Weaver’s choice, which our culture considers criminal, and Handler’s choice, which our culture celebrates as empowering and liberating?” Walsh asked. “The answer, of course, is clear: There is no real difference. A couple of minutes is all that separates abortion from infanticide.”
Damningly, Walsh suggested that if Weaver had gotten her abortion somewhere else, just a little bit earlier, she would have been in the same position as Handler. “If that bathroom had been a clinic, if that trash bag had been a medical waste container, if the baby had been poisoned instead of suffocated, Weaver would be writing a self-congratulatory essay for a feminist website rather than filing a motion with the court of appeals.”
It’s hard to disagree.
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