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As gruesome as it was, the story that Nakia Whitmire originally gave police about how she killed her 4-year-old son paled in comparison to what she really did to him, Suffolk prosecutors said Friday as Whitmire was sentenced in a Riverhead courtroom to 11 years in prison.
Whitmire, 27, pleaded guilty in September to a count of first-degree manslaughter for killing her son, Andrew Gray, inside her Wheatley Heights home on Sept. 5, 2004.
Whitmire originally told police in a videotaped confession that she was angry with her son for misbehaving and "picked him up and shook him hard," punched him, and shoved him into a wall, causing him to hit his head on the corner of a television stand.
But months after being indicted on murder charges, medical examiners determined Andrew died not from being beaten, but from hypothermia and dehydration.
Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Denise Merrifield said that authorities later learned that after beating the child, Whitmire forced him into a stuffy closet, pinned him under a laundry basket filled with clothes so he would not move, "shut the closet, and left."
Whitmire left Andrew home alone as she took a taxi and a train to Smithtown to visit a man she was dating. She returned 10 hours later to find Andrew not breathing.
"It was like a poor animal in an overheated car," Merrifield said. "The poor little thing was in a coffin."
Prior to the sentencing Friday, prosecutors read in court a dictated message from Whitmire's estranged husband and father of her three children, Dorian Gray, who said he once "wanted Nakia to spend the rest of her life in jail," but now hopes mostly "that a lesson was learned from all this."
"What happened to Andrew was a tragedy for all that came in contact with him," Gray said in the statement. "I hope she realizes that going to meet a man was not worth all that she has given up by her actions."
Whitmire's attorney, Steve Fondulis, of Port Jefferson, said his client "is torn apart inside" over her son's death and accepts responsibility for it. He called Whitmire a "bright, articulate person" who was "overwhelmed emotionally and financially" at the time of the slaying, which he said was not intentional.
Fondulis said Whitmire's mother, who helped support her children, had died a week earlier. "She crumbled after that," Fondulis said.
But Merrifield said there was evidence that Whitmire had long been a cruel mother, having her children sleep on the floor as she slept on a bed.
Suffolk County Court Judge Andrew Crecca called the killing a "horrible crime" and told Whitmire that she "should do a lot of thinking over the next 11 years."
