Prosecutors claim a mother tried to kill her five-year-old son with toxic amounts of salt so she could get sympathy. INSIDE EDITION has the story.
A young mom appeared in court and was accused of the unthinkable. Prosecutors say Lacey Spears poisoned her five-year-old son just to get sympathy on Facebook.
Prosecutors said in court, "This mother was intentionally feeding her child salt at toxic levels."
From the day he was born, little Garnett Spears was in and out of the emergency room. His mom reported on Facebook and Twitter. She tweeted: "My sweet angel is in the hospital for the 23rd time :( please pray he gets to come home soon."
She lived in Westchester County, just north of New York City. She started a blog called, “Garnett's Journey: Healing Takes Courage, and We All Have Courage, Even if We Have to Dig a Little to Find It.”
Friends showered her with sympathy, but prosecutors say Lacey was intentionally making Garnett sick, a classic case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the disturbing phenomenon where a mother harms her own child to get attention.
Psychiatrist Dr. Gail Saltz told INSIDE EDITION, "Doing that to their child makes them a patient in a way. They are the mother of a sick child. They feel that that will garner them the attention and love that otherwise they are not going to get."
See Saltz's Interview with INSIDE EDITION
The sick behavior was shown in the movie The Sixth Sense when a little girl came back from the dead with a videotape of her mom harming her.
Prosecutors say they too have similar videotaped evidence against Lacey Spears, saying, "As the defendant is taking her son into that bathroom you see on the video with that connector tube in her hand and that cup. That coincides with evidence in the EEG machine that shows, during that afternoon, that child goes from moderate to severe cerebral dysfunction."
Doctors at Westchester Medical Center discovered abnormally high levels of sodium in Garnett’s body. They say his mother had been poisoning him with an overdose of salt, through a feeding tube.
Garnett's vital organs shut down. This is how Spears reported her son's death to her growing fans on Facebook, writing, "His soul is already with the angels. I'm not ready to let him go."
Lacey Spears looked forlorn at her arraignment this week for second degree murder.
Prosecutor’s said, “The evidence is quite clear. This defendant researched and executed her plan against her own son in a wanton and depraved manner.”
Now, her online followers who were once so understandably filled with sympathy are turning on her with messages like, "Rot in Hell you murderer."
Lacey Spears has pleaded not guilty and denies she did anything to harm her son. If convicted of murder she faces 25 years-to-life in prison.
