A woman has been sentenced after leaving her 10-month-old baby home alone as she went on a ten-day vacation with a new boyfriend.
Neighbors claim that they could hear the baby crying for days, but no one came to her rescue.
Jailyn's mother, Kristel Candelario, left her alone in a playpen with a couple of milk bottles.
A neighbor's doorbell camera caught the 16-month-old's frequent screams, including one at 1 a.m., two days after her mother departed.
However, investigators claimed that Candelario had a male companion who was hundreds of miles away in Puerto Rico. After a few days at the beach and another visit in Detroit, she returned home on June 16 last year to discover her daughter had died. She had been gone for nearly ten days.
Last month, Candelario pled guilty to aggravated homicide and child endangerment.
At her sentence on Monday, forensic pathologist Elizabeth Mooney told a Cleveland hearing that children experience the most severe separation anxiety between the ages of nine and 18 months. She described Jailyn's agonising last days.
"The pain and suffering she endured lasted not only hours, not days, but possibly even a week," Mooney stated through tears.
"This feeling of abandonment for days on end, coupled with the pain of starvation and extreme thirst is a type of suffering I don't think any of us could ever fully fathom."
On Monday, a court sentenced Candelario to life in prison, bringing an end to a case so awful that the detectives involved regarded it as the most heinous they'd ever seen.
