Ashleigh Wade, 24, the woman who stabbed her pregnant friend to death before cutting the victim's baby girl out from her womb in 2015, was found guilty of charges of second-degree murder and kidnapping on Thursday.
The brutal murder of Angelique Sutton who was 8 months pregnant at that time, occurred in November 2015, the same day she was set to marry her boyfriend of 8 years. (Read previous post here)
After a two week trial, a jury of five men and seven women deliberated for five hours if Wade intentionally killed Sutton in order to kidnap her baby by cutting her out from the womb before reaching the unanimous guilty verdict.
According to prosecutors, Wade was accused of killing Sutton in Wade's Bronx apartment on Nov. 20, 2015, after the two former acquaintances had recently reconnected on Facebook and bonded over their pregnancies.
During the gruesome trial, one of the jurors collapsed when the prosecutor displayed a large image of Sutton’s bloody uterus on the bathroom floor. But the juror recovered after medical examiner rushed to her aid.
Assistant
District Attorney Meredith Holtzman told the Court that Wade needed a
baby because she lied for months about being pregnant.“She had baby clothes, baby shoes, diapers, formula, a crib, everything that an expectant mother would need, except a baby. She didn’t have a baby. For that, she needed Angelikque Sutton.”
He argued that Wade, who knew she was not actually pregnant, lured Sutton to her home, stabbing and slashing her in the face and neck and cutting her larynx so that she could not scream. Sutton, who was left with 50 wounds, fought back but bled to death.
The Assistant District Attorney also revealed that during the first part of the attack, all of Sutton's injuries were from the neck up. He said Wade took a paring knife to Sutton's abdomen and cut out Sutton's uterus, removed the baby and discarded the organ.
The prosecutor said once Wade had the baby, named Jenasis, she made a bottle of formula for the newborn, wrapped her up, and told her boyfriend she had just given birth.
After she was arrested for the gruesome murder, Wade gave a written statement to detectives saying she had intended to rescue the baby because she had lost her own in what turned out to be an imaginary pregnancy.
"I sat there thinking about my child that died and thought that I couldn't have any more children so I rescued the baby," she wrote, adding that "holding her felt right and I believed that the little girl was mine."
Although, she later said parts of the statement were influenced, but at the trial, Wade insisted that she really did believe the baby was her own. “When I had the baby I remembered it to be mine," she testified.
Wade, who also testified about her upbringing at the courtroom, had several imagined pregnancies before the one that brought her into contact with Sutton.
Miraculously Sutton’s daughter, Jenasis, survived the attack and is now a healthy 22-month-old.
Wade
who's currently in the psych ward at Elmhurst Hospital faces life
imprisonment for the brutal murder. According to New York Daily News,
she'll be sentenced on October 20
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