A woman from Massachusetts was given a life sentence without parole for killing her young sons in a ritualistic way.
This week, Latarsha Sanders was found guilty of killing her sons, Edson Brito, 8, and La'son Brito, 5, in 2018.
After being found guilty of killing her two young sons in 2018, a Massachusetts woman will spend the rest of her life in prison, with no chance of getting out.
WBZ, a CBS Boston affiliate, said that Latarsha L. Sanders, age 48, was found guilty on Tuesday of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her sons Edson "Marlon" Brito, age 8, and La'son Brito, age 5, as well as one count of intimidating a witness. She got two life sentences without the chance of parole at the same time for the murders, and 9 to 10 years for trying to scare a witness.
Prosecutors say Sanders stabbed the boys to death on Monday, February 5, 2018, in the family's Brockton apartment, which is near Boston. The boy who was eight years old was stabbed 76 times, had 20 other cuts or scratches, and had a candle stuck in his throat. The boy who was five years old was stabbed 23 times in the back, chest, and torso, and he had 80 other small cuts or scratches.
Plymouth County prosecutors said in a statement after Sanders was convicted that she cleaned the boys' bodies, wrapped them in blankets, put them in their beds, and cleaned up the blood from her crimes before running to the neighbor's house. Then she ran yelling and crying to a neighbor's house, where she had to be held back by emergency medical workers.
The neighbor told the police that Sanders lived with his children. They found the boys' dead bodies in their beds and said they were dead right away.
According to the Boston Globe, Sanders told prosecutors that her husband and 16-year-old daughter were responsible for the murders when she first talked to them. She then told detectives that the murders were "voodoo stuff," according to the story. She said that when she killed her older son, she tried to do a ritual but failed, which is why she also killed her younger child.
Voodoo is a religion, but people who practice it don't kill people as part of their rituals. At a vigil in 2018, the father of the boys, Edson Brito, said that he had never known his ex-wife to do voodoo. This was reported by the Boston Herald at the time.
Her parents said that Sanders had serious mental health problems when the murders happened. Her mother, Earline Sanders, told police at the time that Latarsha often watched her neighbors and was obsessed with the mythical Illuminati and the rituals they were said to do, according to a report in the Boston Globe.
Earline Sanders also told police that her daughter had told her on the Friday before the murders that she hated her oldest son and had threatened to kill him and put his body in the freezer. She also said that Latarsha Sanders told her on Saturday that she was going to "sacrifice people" to move up in the world.
In later court hearings, prosecutors said that Latarsha Sanders had written in a journal about setting up a GoFundMe to get money from a "good story" and had set up a post office box to get fan mail before the murders, Oxygen.com said.
In April 2018, Plymouth County District Attorney Jessica Kenny told the court that the notebook showed that she expected money to come in and set up the P.O. Box to receive fan mail. "That may have been her mindset."
She then asked other family members—her other daughter, Shemea Sanders, was 27 when her brothers were killed, according to the Herald—why they hadn't talked to the media about the murders and encouraged them to do so.
She is being kept at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute - Framingham at the moment.