A Brooklyn woman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison on Wednesday for drowning her three young children in the ocean near Coney Island’s famed boardwalk.
Erin Merdy, 34, pleaded guilty earlier this year to first-degree murder charges in the 2022 killing of her 7-year-old son Zachary, her 4-year-old daughter Liliana and her 3-month-old son Oliver.
“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. He added that the children’s lives were taken “in the most heartbreaking and unthinkable way.”
The frantic search for the three children began in the early hours of Sept. 12, 2022, after New York City police received a call from Merdy’s relatives, concerned that she intended to harm her kids.
Officers first found the mother, barefoot and soaking wet, 2 miles (3 kilometers) down the boardwalk from the section of Coney Island where she lived. She repeatedly said that the children were gone and that she was sorry, according to prosecutors.
Hours later, the bodies of the children were recovered from the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean, steps from the boardwalk and about a dozen blocks from the stadium where the Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team plays.
The city medical examiner’s office ruled their deaths homicides by drowning.
The evidence against Merdy included video showing her walking toward the ocean with the children just before 1 a.m., according to the criminal complaint.
At the time, relatives said she may have been going through postpartum depression.
Relatives have said in media interviews that Merdy appeared to have been struggling with the children.
Her estranged ex-husband, Derrick Merdy, told The New York Times his son, Zachary, would arrive for visits dirty and complaining that he wasn’t getting enough to eat. Court records indicated that Merdy had been threatened with eviction for being thousands of dollars behind on her rent.
Acquaintances and relatives, though, also said she loved the children.
“She did a little crazy stuff, but nothing that would lead to harming her children or herself,” an uncle, Eddy Stephen, told The New York Post.
“She loved her children to no end,” her aunt, Dine Stephen, told the Daily News.
