Chesapeake woman gets life in prison for stepdaughter's murder

Fighting to avoid spending the rest of her life locked up, Brandy P. Sawyer blamed her husband for the abuse that killed her 5-year-old stepdaughter, Carly.

She blamed her passiveness on being abused herself as a wife and child. She apologized. She wept.

But in the end Friday, Circuit Court Judge Randall D. Smith said he had little choice. With no way of knowing when she might be safe to the community or to herself, he sentenced the 22-year-old to life in prison. He left her hope for eventual freedom in the forms of a rare governor's pardon or a "geriatric release" due to age or illness.

"We have a situation where a child was tortured to death," Smith said. "It has to be one of the most horrific murders the court has considered."

Carly died in June 2009. Police and the medical examiner said she had been repeatedly beaten, denied food, tied up and made to sleep in a cardboard box in the Sawyers' rented South Norfolk home.

Brandy Sawyer pleaded guilty in May to first-degree

murder under a provision that allowed her to admit only that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her. Her husband, Joshua S. Sawyer, 26, pleaded similarly that same month, and received a life sentence in October. Carly was his daughter from a previous marriage.

Three other children - one Brandy's and two both of theirs, including a son born after Brandy was jailed - live with relatives.

The Sawyers said they punished Carly for soiling herself. But on Friday, Brandy Sawyer testified that the abuse was virtually all Joshua's doing, from forced runs up stairs to whippings.

She said she initially took the blame herself because he forced her to. She said she didn't know how serious Carly's condition was. She said her husband also abused her, by hitting and choking that grew worse after the family moved from North Carolina to Chesapeake in 2008.

He cut her off from her family, limited her outside contacts, checked the mileage on the family vehicle to see whether she went anywhere, and threatened to keep her children if she left, she said. With apologies to his parents, she said he forced her to watch and then participate in sexual threesomes with other men - anything to keep him happy and the family together.

"Are you telling the court you were a prisoner in your own house?" asked Steven Shames, her attorney.

"In a way, yes," Sawyer responded.

Sawyer spent 42 minutes on the witness stand giving her first public explanation. She described an abusive, neglectful upbringing by a single mother who would trade sex with the 13-year-old Sawyer and an even younger sister to a drug dealer for a fix.

A. Weare Zwemer, a forensic psychologist, examined Sawyer. He testified that she grew up with no model for good parenting, and learned to cover up things. She attempted suicide and mutilated herself by cutting. She suffered from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Ms. Sawyer accepted suffering as her lot in life," Zwemer said. "And I think she identified with Carly."

He said she wasn't the "driving force" in Carly's abuse.

"I was a coward. I'd sit on the couch and cry," Sawyer said.

She said she loved Carly as she did her own daughters. Carly wouldn't eat, so she'd put her food in a blender and try to spoon-feed her, she said. But Carly also tried to sneak food, Sawyer said, an inconsistency that Judge Smith noted.

Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Stephanie Pass asked why she didn't escape while Joshua was at work, and why she texted him from home that Carly wet herself, leading to the fatal attack.

"No, I was not scared. I felt stuck," Brandy Sawyer said.

"Too stuck to save yourself or the children?" Pass pressed.

"You felt stuck," Sawyer answered in a low voice. "I had nobody."

"Joshua Sawyer was the driving force; Brandy was a soldier," Shames argued. "All this garbage in her head, and she finds herself now with basically nowhere else to go."

"She parented her own children just fine," Pass said. "She knew not to tie them up. She knew not to put them in a box."

She also noted that Sawyer was able to get away from a previous relationship, in Ohio. Pass called her not a soldier, but a "general."

"They were in this together," she said. "They waged war on Carly's little body. And she's not with us anymore."

Carly's mother, Jennifer Kimery, watched from a front row, dabbing at tears.

She told reporters afterward she was happy with the sentence, before her companions pulled her away. Sawyer's family and friends declined to comment.

Matthew Bowers, (757) 222-5221, matthew.bowers@pilotonline.com