A 37-year-old woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison for giving her young son a fatal overdose of an adult sleeping pill.
Dunitze Venter, who was sentenced on Thursday, will be deported to South Africa after completing her prison term. She pleaded guilty in September to second-degree murder in the death of her four-year-old son, Kyle.
”It’s extremely painful and I’m just glad it’s over today,” Anthony Venter, Kyle’s father, told The Miami Herald for its Friday editions.
Anthony Venter said he and his now former wife were having marital problems on January 25, 2001, the day she committed the murder. According to prosecutors, Dunitze Venter fed her son an overdose of the sleeping pill Ambien, then made three separate suicide attempts.
The woman sobbed while reading an apology letter to the Broward Circuit Judge Elijah Williams and family members in the courtroom, including her former husband.
”Lord alone knows the depth and intensity of my daily struggle,” she said.
Her attorneys had asked for a 14-year sentence. ”I don’t even have words to describe what you did,” Williams told the woman while issuing her sentence. ‒ Sapa-AP