Erin Merdy admitted guilt on first-degree murder charges for killing her three children — Zachary, 7, Liliana, 4, and infant Oliver — in 2022
A Brooklyn woman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for drowning her three young children in the Atlantic Ocean near the Coney Island boardwalk in 2022.
The 34-year-old entered a guilty plea earlier this year on first-degree murder charges for the killings of Zachary, 7, Liliana, 4, and Oliver, who was just 3 months old, The Associated Press reported.
"No sentence can fully measure the loss of a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a three-month-old baby, or the grief their loved ones will carry forever," Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement, according to the AP. He added that the children's lives were taken "in the most heartbreaking and unthinkable way."
A message left with Merdy's attorney was not returned, the AP reported.
On the night of Sept. 12, 2022, a call came in to police from family members who feared Merdy was going to hurt her children. When officers tracked her down, she was standing on the boardwalk roughly 2 miles from her Coney Island home, drenched and without shoes. Prosecutors say she kept telling them the children were gone and apologizing, according to the AP.
Search crews pulled the children's bodies from the Atlantic shoreline within hours, at a spot just off the boardwalk and roughly a dozen blocks down from the Brooklyn Cyclones' minor league stadium. The city medical examiner's office ruled their deaths homicides by drowning, according to NBC News.
Surveillance footage captured in the criminal complaint showed Merdy heading into the water with the children shortly before 1 a.m., the AP reported. Around the time of her arrest, family members told reporters they believed she had been suffering from postpartum depression.
