35-year-old Narges Shafeirad has been given a 50-year prison sentence by a Maryland judge, for fatally poisoning her five-year-old son, Daniel Dana, and then burning his body in an attempt to cover up her crime.
Prosecuting attorneys claim that Shafeirad was angry with her husband for divorcing her and that she was jealous of the relationship he was having with his nanny. She allegedly told him, “I will make you cry. You will be sorry.”
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Court records indicate that Shafeirad claimed to be depressed because of the divorce and custody battle, and also because she had lost her job and apartment.
Nelson Rupp, a Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge, said, “A mother murdering her child is a crime so horrific that it is natural to try to determine why. The only thing that I can conclude is that it was a determination made by the defendant for reasons only she knows of.”
While her public defenders did not comment, Melanie Creedon, an attorney for Shafeirad, said in court, “This was an act of a helpless and hopeless, broken woman who had basically reached the end, and who saw no way out.”
Shafeirad herself claimed in court, “I was a broken woman. I am still not able to believe that I have lost my son.”
According to court documents, on June 15, 2015, Shafeirad forced her Daniel to drink 150 percent of the amount of cold medicine that it would take to kill an adult. Daniel was not sick. Over the course of the night, she kept giving him lethal doses of cold medicine.
The medicine she forced him to take contained diphenhydramine, which is the active ingredient in over-the-counter medications such as Benadryl, Sominex, and Unisom. Reportedly, she did this every two to four hours until his body couldn’t take anymore and he died.
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After this, she borrowed a car from, someone, put Daniel’s body in it and then proceeded to set the car on fire. When police and first responders arrived, she told them that she and her son were taking a trip to the beach and that she had put gasoline in water bottles just in case there were no filling stations along their planned route. She claimed that the car caught fire when she lit up a cigarette.
In a letter to the court, Daniel’s father Hamid said, “I wake up at nights with nightmares. I keep seeing Daniel’s beautiful face being forced a bottle of poison. Daniel had a beautiful face but he didn’t like medicine. So I keep dreaming how Narges forced the medicine down his mouth, and that was the last thing Daniel experienced in this world. Why?”
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