Pennsylvania teen accused of killing 12-year-old girl, sentenced to 15 to 40 years

BENSALEM, Pa. (AP) — A Pennsylvania teen charged in a 12-year-old girl's death after another teen reported receiving a video asking for help cleaning up and getting rid of the body has been sentenced to 15 to 40 years in prison as part of a plea deal.

Ash Cooper, who formerly went by Joshua Cooper and is now 18, pleaded guilty Thursday to third-degree murder and other charges in the November 2022 death of Morgan Connors in Bensalem.

Bucks County prosecutors said police who responded to a trailer park that afternoon about a possible homicide were told that a teenager who was chatting on Instagram with an acquaintance had said that individual, later identified as Cooper, claimed to have just killed someone.

"In the video chat, Cooper flipped the video image and showed the legs and feet of someone covered in blood," prosecutors said. "Cooper then asked the acquaintance for assistance with cleaning up the scene and disposing of the body."

Arriving officers spotted a youth running out of the back of the trailer who told them, "It was an accident," authorities said in an affidavit of probable cause.

Prosecutors said Cooper has never revealed the reason for the killing. A note found in Cooper's bedroom was provided to the judge but not made public.

Cooper's attorney,

Paul Lang, told the court as his client wiped away tears that Cooper, who was 16 at the time of the crime, had a "difficult upbringing" and felt "significant remorse and sorrow."

Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Finley accepted the plea agreement but expressed concerns about what he described as Cooper's "troubling history of conduct and treatment of other people," and the lack of any "real explanation" for what occurred the day of the murder, the Bucks County Courier Times reported.

"The one thing that is certain is it's a horrible tragedy," Finley said. "You won't spend the rest of your life in jail. You have an opportunity to rehabilitate your conduct, to seek redemption. You better take advantage of that."

Cooper, who also pleaded guilty to possession of an instrument of crime and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, was also sentenced to a consecutive sentence of seven years of probation.

Connors' grandfather and adoptive father, Allen Gold, called Morgan a "sweet, beautiful" person and said that every year on her birthday the family remembers the aspiring writer now gone.

"A parent should never have to bury a child," Gold said in a statement read by prosecutors in court. "The human heart was not designed for such heartbreak."