ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, October 19, 1996 TAG: 9610210063
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
Veronica Via, who beat her newborn baby to death at a Roanoke homeless shelter rather than be troubled with raising her alone, was convicted of first-degree murder Friday night and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Although Via did not testify, the jury convicted her largely on her own words. Much of the evidence presented during a two-day trial in Roanoke Circuit Court stemmed from statements she made to police earlier this year.
Abandoned by the child's father, shunned by her own family and saddled with financial problems that left her homeless, Via told police she wanted to send her 14-day-old daughter, Jasmine, to "a better place."
So on the night of Dec. 16, in a small bedroom at the Transitional Living Center on 24th Street Northwest, Via held her child to her chest and struck her ``10 times, maybe more" in the back of the head with her open hand.
"I know that she was going to be with the Lord," Via told Detective K.L. Sidwell of the Roanoke Police Department.
Via's attorneys used the statements to portray Via as a desperate woman pushed to a point where she no longer could control her anger and despair. But Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Betty Jo Anthony said those were the words of a selfish woman more concerned with her own needs than those of her child.
"Everything was about `me, me, me.' There was no place for Jasmine in this woman's life," Anthony said.
"She was better off if the baby was dead; and in her mind, the baby was better off, too."
Via's life was not as bleak as she professed, the prosecutor argued. Via, 29, had a job as a housekeeper at a Roanoke hospital, family members who cared enough to attend the trial, and a guarantee that she could remain at the homeless shelter for up to two years.
Yet on the morning of Dec. 17, Via showed up in the emergency room with her dead baby wrapped in a blanket. She told doctors and police that she had awoken that morning and found Jasmine lying cold and still in her crib.
Several months later, after an autopsy determined that Jasmine had died of a head injury, Via confessed to Sidwell that she had beaten Jasmine - in part because she was frustrated with the infant's crying.
Via described her blows as "hard slaps, as if you were punishing a normal-sized child." As she put Jasmine to bed, Via told Sidwell, the infant was whimpering. After sleeping for the next 12 hours, Via awoke and found her dead.
While prosecutors made much of the fact that Via said she wanted to send her daughter to "a better place," Assistant Public Defender John Varney argued to the jury that those comments were not an indication of premeditated, first-degree murder, but rather a way for Via to console herself as she struggled to cope with an unintentional killing.
"To base a first-degree murder conviction on someone's religious beliefs in the afterlife, I would suggest to you is not fair," Varney told the jury. Often quoting from Scripture, Varney argued that Via was mentally incapable of planning to kill her own flesh and blood. "She was angry, she was overwhelmed and nothing less than involuntary manslaughter."
Although those arguments were not successful in reducing the charge from murder to manslaughter, they apparently played a role when the jury began to consider a sentence. After deliberating about two hours before convicting Via of first-degree murder, which carries a sentence of 20 years to life, the jury took just 10 minutes before imposing the minimum punishment.
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Via. color.by CNB