Detroit mother Mitchelle Blair has received a life sentence with no chance of parole for the murders of two of her children following years of torture in their own home. Blair expressed no remorse as she fully admitted to the charges held against her, as horrifying details of the childrens’ ordeals were recounted for the jury.
Blair pleaded guilty to two counts of premeditated murder, two counts of felony murder, and one count of torture regarding the deaths of 13-year-old Stoni Ann Blair and 9-year-old son Stephen Gage Berry.
Reports regarding Blair’s treatment of her four children are harrowing as they describe detailed and horrific torture and abuse, all as Blair depicted herself as a doting and loving mother to friends and family online.
The four children faced regular acts of abuse from Blair during their years in the torture home, including being whipped with an extension cord and beaten with a plank.
Despite this savage abuse, Blair heightened the horrific levels of abuse by torturing the children by burning them with hot irons as well as scalding them with boiled liquids
Prior to his death, 9-year-old Stephen was kicked, punched and beaten by his mother, before she scalded his genitals with boiling water and forced him to drink toxic Windex . Blair then hung Stephen by fastening a belt around his neck, placing a bag over his head and manually holding the thrashing child until he died.
Blair then kept the body of the deceased child in her freezer.
“I don’t feel no remorse for the death of them demons.”
In the case of 13-year-old daughter Stoni, Blair told the court that the young girl had said she did not like her surviving siblings, enraging her mother.
She was then stranged with a t-shirt and suffocated with a trash bag over her head in a similar manner to her younger brother and stored in the freezer alongside his body.
“[Your children] lived in terrible fear of you. And I find that just so sad in this case,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Dana Hathaway. “After all is said and done, you imposed the death penalty on your own children.”
“I did,” Blair responded.
36-year-old Mitchelle Blair had received multiple visits from child protection to home, now dubbed “House of Horrors” by Judge Hathaway, following allegations of abuse during 2002 and 2005. However, no efforts were made to remove the four children from her custody.
The two surviving children, 11-years-old and 17-years-old have now been placed in protective custody where they hope to recover from the trauma they both suffered and witnessed whilst in Blair’s care.
[Image credit: Daniel Mears]