Rosie Newman’s sleepless nights are filled with thoughts of how excited she felt anticipating the arrival of her first grandchild, an unborn child killed along with Newman’s daughter just days before the expected due date.
“My life is reduced to memories of my daughter’s life, instead of being filled by the love a grandchild provides,” Newman wrote in a statement read inside a Cook County courtroom on Tuesday.
Newman’s daughter, Rosemary, was likely only two weeks away from giving birth to a girl when the child’s father and his girlfriend worked together to strangle the pregnant teenager with a cell phone cord in April 2011, prosecutors said.
Cook County Judge Brian Flaherty sentenced the unborn child’s father, Deandre Minkens, to life in prison on Tuesday in his Markham courtroom. Flaherty called Minkins one of the most evil people he’s dealt with in his long career, describing the 25-year-old as cold-hearted and a deceiver.
“I’m sure his own family doesn’t have any idea what he is like,” Flaherty told the court.
Minkens, along with his co-defendant and on-again, off-again girlfriend Shante Thomas, was convicted in June of the first-degree murder of 18-year-old Rosemary Newman and the intentional homicide of her unborn child, who was going to be named Navaeh, or “heaven” spelled backwards, according to family.
Thomas hid in the back of a white Saturn driven by Minkens and waited for her cue, a song with the lyric “I hate you,” prosecutors said. After Minkens pushed “play,” Thomas sprung from under the pile of clothes that concealed her and wrapped the cord around the neck of Newman, who was sitting in the front seat of the Saturn. Her half-naked body was found face-down in the mud at a wooded forest preserve near Calumet City.
Minkens had lured Newman to the Crestwood Applebee’s with the possibility that the couple might reconcile, prosecutors said.
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According to prosecutors, both charges of murder and unintentional homicide would have each carried a sentence of 20-60 years in prison. But the state successfully argued that the death of the unborn child constituted a second person, and that Illinois law states a person convicted of first-degree murder when more than one person is killed will face a life sentence.
Prosecutors plan to argue that Thomas also should receive a life sentence.
On Tuesday, witnesses for the state spent much of the afternoon testifying about Minkens’ history of violence, and the violent behavior he has exhibited while in custody, including head-butting and injuring a guard, and starting a fight with another prisoner.
A Georgia police officer told the court via video conference about how Minkens, who had run off to that state as a teenager and got married, violently shook a baby there. Minkens received probation in connection with a related domestic abuse conviction.
Minkens’ defense attorney argued that he was capable of rehabilitation, and even though it was a heinous act, a life sentence did not fit the crime. Minkens parents, Victor and Tonya Davis, testified that he was a rebellious as a child, but wanted so badly to become a father and husband.
“If my son did anything wrong, he did too much too fast,” Tonya Davis said, adding that Minkens wanted a house and children when he was “too young.”
Thomas is scheduled to return to court for her sentencing hearing on Oct. 17.
Nick Swedberg is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.