Brooklyn Woman Sentenced to 20 Years to Life for Drowning Her Three Children

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 boardwalk. Erin Merdy, 34, pleaded guilty this year to first-degree murder in the 2022 killings of her 7-year-old son Zachary, her 4-year-old daughter Liliana, and her 3-month-old son Oliver.

Gonzalez said in a statement that no sentence can fully measure the loss of the children or the grief their loved ones will carry forever. He added that the children’s lives were taken in the most heartbreaking and unthinkable way.

2022 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 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. , according to the criminal complaint.