BY: Walker
Published 8 hours ago
After just two hours of deliberation, a jury in Gwinnett County, Georgia found Celeste Owens guilty on 21 counts related to the 2021 killing of her partner’s autistic 8-year-old daughter Amari Hall.
The case, unfolding at the Gwinnett County Courthouse, has captured widespread attention due to the disturbing details of the child’s death.
It took about two hours for jurors to reach a unanimous verdict on charges including malice murder, three counts of felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, 11 counts of cruelty to children, making a false statement, and concealing the death of another.
The judge called this crime the most evil case of child cruelty she had ever seen.
“My heart is empty. I miss Amari every day,” the victim’s grandmother, Barbara Wright, said during the sentencing hearing immediately following the verdict. She was fighting back tears. “My heart is broken in millions of pieces that I have not been able to put back together,” she said.
“I talk to her like she’s still here. There are days when I can hear her voice,” Wright added.
“She definitely didn’t deserve that,” the young girl’s aunt, Tacara Wright, told the judge. “Respectfully judge, I hope she burns in hell.”
“This is by far, the most heinous, evil I have ever seen in my entire career and I do not understand it,” Judge Angela Duncan said during the sentencing.
Owens was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, plus 235 years that will be served consecutively.
“You will never see the light of day. to perpetrate this type of behavior, cruelty an evilness upon another person,” the judge added.
“This was a horrible way to treat these children and a tragedy that Amari Hall was killed as a result,” Gwinnett County District Attorney Patsy Austin-Gatson said. “We pray that her sisters are able to heal from the abuse they endured and that their extended family can get a sense of closure.”
During closing arguments, prosecutor Sabrina Nizam presented graphic evidence and testimony that painted a harrowing picture of abuse. “This defendant helped beat the living life out of Amari,” Nizam told the jury, emphasizing that Owens and the child’s mother, Brittany Hall, acted together in the abuse.
Nizam detailed a pattern of severe mistreatment, saying, “Slapping them in the back of the head, the stomping, the blindfolding, the laying on the ground — they did this together; their method was together.”
Amari’s body was discovered in a wooded area in DeKalb County, days after her mother reported her missing in November 2021. According to prosecutors, Owens fatally struck the child, placed her body in trash bags, and dumped her in the forest. Both Owens and Hall initially claimed Amari had disappeared from their extended-stay hotel room.
“It doesn’t matter who delivered the fatal blow,” Nizam argued. “Ladies and gentlemen, it was not one fatal blow. Every single blow was fatal to Amari.”
Brittany Hall, the biological mother of all three children, awaits trial at a later date.
via: FOX5 Atlanta
