07 September 2023 , 16:59
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A twisted mum who deliberately left her disabled daughter to cook to death in a boiling hot car while she and her her boyfriend were high on drugs has been handed a massive jail sentence.
Four years after 13-year-old Cristina Pangalangan died in a hot car, a jury convicted her mother and the mother’s boyfriend of murder, finding that the pair showed a reckless disregard for the child’s life when they left her in a car for hours under the baking summer sun, according to reports.
Cristina died of heatstroke on August 5, 2019, inside a Volkswagen parked outside a residence. She was left in the car for five hours and 41 minutes after Rita Pangalangan and her then-boyfriend, Larry Eugene King Jr, placed the teen in the backseat while, according to the prosecutor, they were high on methamphetamine.
Cristina suffered from cerebral palsy, which rendered her speechless and confined to a wheelchair. Her condition prevented her from opening the car door or shouting out for help. But the 13-year-old, who enjoyed watching cartoons and being in a swimming pool, could feel emotions, ranging from happiness to pain.
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Cristina was left in the car for five hours and 41 minutes after Rita Pangalangan and her then-boyfriend, Larry Eugene King Jr., placed the teen in the backseat while, according to the prosecutor, they were high on methamphetamine
Jurors, after deliberating for almost two and a half hours, convicted the pair of murder and unlawful conduct toward a childCristina Pangalangan died August 5, 2019, after she had been left for five hours inside a hot vehicle on Lowcountry Highway in Colleton County, South Carolina, US. She was 13.
Jurors at a Colleton County court, after deliberating for almost two and a half hours, convicted the pair of murder and unlawful conduct toward a child on September 1. Circuit Judge Clifton Newman sentenced the mother to 37 years in prison. He sentenced King to 32 years. Murder in South Carolina carries a mandatory minimum penalty of 30 years in prison.
“It’s not a traditional murder,” Judge Newman said before handing down his sentence. “It’s not, you pull a gun and shoot someone in the head. But your conduct was so extremely reckless that it constitutes a willful disregard for human life. And it constitutes murder.”
He cited research that parents can unintentionally leave their child in a car, thinking they dropped the child off at daycare.
“But that’s not this situation, where there’s absolute total disregard for a child. Considering that the two of you were there around the car any number of times without doing anything to save this child’s life and contributing to the child’s death.”
The five hours Cristina baked inside the car were captured on King’s home surveillance footage. Fourteenth Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone, who prosecuted the defendants himself, made the decision to present the entire footage to jurors.
It began when King placed Cristina inside the car outside his home at 11.15am. and walked toward his porch. King had told Pangalangan to leave his home after he learned she had been unfaithful to him, he testified. But the mother did not leave. The pair spoke for an extended time.
They later hugged, kissed and swung on a porch swing. All the while, Cristina sat inside the car in the heat of a South Carolina summer.
The mother checked on her daughter one hour later. She did not come back to the car again until 3pm. When she did, it was locked. Instead of breaking a window, Pangalangan and King left for nearly an hour to retrieve another pair of keys. When they returned, they found Cristina dead.