Woman gets 5-years for toddler's death

New Haven (WTNH) - A Hamden woman has been sentenced to five years in prison and five years probation in the dehydration death of a toddler. The baby's mother was so distraught during today's sentencing, she had to be removed from the courtroom.

Sharon Patterson plead guilty to criminally negligent homicide in the death of 23 month old Amari Jackson. Prosecutors say Patterson didn't give the baby anything to drink for more than a week because he wet the bed.

Cameras were not allowed inside the courtroom, but News Channel's Annie Rourke says that when Patterson tried to apologize, Amari's mother began screaming and tried to lunge across the barrier before she was forcibly removed. By the time she walked out of the New Haven court, Sara Hicks had collected herself and did not want to speak to reporters.

Amari was just one month shy of his second birthday when he died in February 2008. Sara Hicks says she was so ill that she left her son at Patterson's Putnam Avenue apartment in Hamden. But Patterson denied the boy to drink any fluids for at least a week.

"Part of the deprivation was that Sharon Patterson laced drinking glasses throughout the house with some form of hot sauce so Amari wouldn't drink," said Capt. Ronald Smith, Hamden Police Department.

In court today, Patterson's defense attorney said his client is not a monster, rather she has diminished mental capacity. At her trial, her charge was reduced from manslaughter to negligent homicide. Experts testified that she has the decision-making ability of a six-year old.

But that didn't soften the blow for Amari's family as Sara Hicks sobbed throughout the proceedings, pleading with the judge to impose a strict sentence saying, "The dead cannot cry out for justice."