Mother of slain toddler sentenced
The mother of a 3-year-old boy beaten to death last summer agreed to testify against the two women accused of killing him and was sentenced to three years in prison Tuesday.
Brandi Mokarzel, 24, pleaded guilty to neglect of a child causing great bodily harm. Her son, Xavier Mokarzel-Satchel, was beaten to death July 7, 2017, in an apartment at Eagle Landing, off Silver Star Road in Orange County.
Mokarzel left her sentencing hearing Tuesday afternoon to go to a deposition with attorneys in the cases of her former girlfriend, Lakesha Lewis, and Lewis’ mother, Callene Barton. Both women could face the death penalty if convicted. Lewis’ trial is set for September 2019, and Barton’s proceedings have been on hold since a judge found her incompetent to proceed in August.
Mokarzel told Circuit Judge John Marshall Kest she had post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety and depression. Otherwise she did not speak much during the hearing, quietly answering Kest’s yes-or-no questions.
Kest sentenced Mokarzel to three years in prison followed by 12 years of probation and said she had to testify truthfully in her co-defendants’ trials. Because of the planned depositions Tuesday afternoon she was not taken directly to jail, but instead ordered to surrender to Orange County deputies by noon Wednesday.
Xavier’s parental grandmother, Latina Mackey, remembered a boy with big, dark eyes and curly hair who loved Curious George. He lived with her in North Carolina from December 2015, when the boy’s father had to move to Washington state for a job and left him with Mackey, to April 2016, when Mokarzel sent police to Mackey’s home to get custody of the Xavier.
“He was happy with me,” Mackey wrote, in a letter Kest read silently on the bench Tuesday. “He was healthy and he was in a stable home surrounded by people who loved and cared for him that would never lift a finger to hurt him.”
Mokarzel and her son were living with Barton, 59, and Lewis, 30, before the boy’s death.
Mokarzel told deputies that Barton, upset after Xavier had raided the kitchen, threw the boy against a wall, and that Lewis beat him with a plastic rod from window blinds.
Lewis said she was upset over the boy’s eating, and that Mokarzel was abusive and unwilling to take care of her toddler.
“Literally he devoured every [expletive] thing in the kitchen, he ate all six Danimals that we just bought, he opened a jug of milk [and] drank that, ate graham crackers, ate frozen waffles, every [expletive] thing,” Lewis told detectives.