"Our lives have been completely turned upside down," Kim Richardson said.
The parents of Brooke Skylar Richardson are speaking out for the first time about their daughter's acquittal.
“It was the worst nightmare,” Kim Richardson, Skylar's mother, told CBS' "48 Hours" of the trial. “Purgatory every day. Our lives have been completely turned upside down.”
Skylar, who had been accused of giving birth in secret and then burying her newborn in her parents' Ohio backyard, was found not guilty of aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter and endangering a child earlier this month. She was found guilty of gross abuse of a corpse but was ultimately credited for time served and released.
Kim said she still can't believe she didn't notice her daughter's pregnancy.
“I couldn’t feel my body. I could not get up,” she said of learning of the secret birth.
She added: “How could that happen? I’ve seen her every day. I look at her. I talk to her. I hug her.”
But both parents insist their daughter, now 20, is not capable of murder. At trial, Skylar's lawyers said that the baby was stillborn and the grieving mother buried her child in a marked grave, a sign of the depth of her feeling for the infant.
Scott Richardson, Skylar's father, echoed what he said at trial while speaking to "48 Hours."
“There’s no way she would ever hurt anyone,” he said.
He added that letting his daughter speak to police without an attorney is the biggest mistake of his life.
"We thought we were doing the right thing by cooperating," he said. "Turns out to be the absolutely wrong thing."
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