Mother Who Killed Her Four Young Children Sentenced To Five Decades Behind Bars
A Tennessee judge handed down a life sentence Tuesday (Feb. 8) to the mother convicted of fatally stabbing four of her own children, despite testimony that she was mentally ill.
Local Memphis station WATN reports that Judge James Lammey ruled that Shanynthia Gardner would be eligible for parole after serving 51 years. In December 2021, Lammey, in a non-jury bench trial, found Gardner guilty on 20 counts including first-degree murder, child abuse, child neglect and child endangerment. Lammey rejected her insanity defense.
On July 1, 2016, Gardner stabbed her four youngest children: 4-year-old Tallen; 3-year-old Sya; 2-year-old Sahvi; and 6-month old Yahzi at the family’s apartment. Her eldest child, who was 7, survived by running to a neighbor’s house for help.
At the trial, the children’s father, Martin Gardner, testified that he didn’t see any signals that something was wrong, according to local station KMOV. Gardner told him on the day of the stabbings that she was planning to watch a movie with their children.
But Gardner’s sister testified that she had a history of mental illness that included episodes of paranoia, KMOV reported. A medical expert concluded in 2017 that Gardner was “mentally defective” when she murdered her children.
Gardner’s friends and family told local Memphis station WMC in 2016 that she went missing twice in the previous 18 months. In one incident, she took her kids out of school and drove them to Mississippi. But they never knew her to be violent with her children.
According to WATN, the prosecutor agreed that Gardner was mentally ill but argued that she understood at the time that killing her children was wrong.
