A Gary man got 20 years Thursday in a plea deal for killing his baby daughter.
Casey Burnett, 25, signed a plea deal May 7 for aggravated battery.
A probable cause affidavit says his daughter, Kylee Burnett, died in September 2022 as a result of injuries consistent with shaken-baby syndrome.
The girl’s mother Kamia Johnson and other family were completely grief-stricken in court.
Her “life changed forever” when she watched the 1-year-old girl take her last breath, she said on the stand.
“All of this could have been avoided,” she said.
At the hospital, Casey Burnett tried to comfort her, saying their family — with an older son — was “complete.”
“I looked at you as a monster,” she said tearfully. “You broke my family.”
Keyocha Johnson, the girl’s aunt, said they lived with the reality that Kylee was “not coming back.”
She was so young, she “couldn’t even scream” for help, she said.
Deputy Prosecutor Jessica Arnold said the plea deal was partly for some inconsistencies in findings by medical experts and the lack of cooperation from one witness.
Defense lawyer Adam Tavitas acknowledged the coroner’s report didn’t totally match with what some medical experts had concluded.
He said his client’s remorse was “genuine.”
The term was not a “slap on the wrist,” later adding it was a very sad and tragic case.
Burnett apologized in court.
Commissioner Karyn Price, filling in for Judge Gina Jones, said the family would probably never have the answers they wanted.
Indiana law requires inmates to serve 75% of their sentence. Burnett has credit of about 20 months already spent in jail. He may serve about a dozen years.
After the hearing, Kamia Johnson said her daughter was a “happy-go-lucky” baby who loved to eat, loved Minnie Mouse and her big brother, now 5.
Her smile lit up a room. She was “just perfect,” she said.
She left pictures of the girl all over their house. Her brother struggled with her death, and was non-verbal for about two years.
The signs had been there. Burnett was “abusive” while she was pregnant, she said. At the hospital after she was born, he didn’t make the same effort to bond with the girl as he did with her brother.
She was troubled by this, saying Burnett wasn’t involved with a previous daughter.
A 20-year sentence was not enough, but she said there was some relief that he took responsibility.
Court records state Johnson said she went to the victim’s bedroom and found her lying face-down in a pillow with blankets completely covering her in her crib, the affidavit said. The baby was unresponsive, she told police, was unresponsive.
Doctors at Comer Children’s Hospital said the girl suffered “severe hypoxic injury and herniation to the brain, extensive retinal hemorrhages and lacerations to the liver and spleen,” the affidavit states. A Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office report stated she was pronounced dead at 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, 2022 at the hospital.
When questioned by police, records show Burnett told them after he and a relative “chilled” by smoking a joint, he gave her and the other children melatonin about 11 p.m. to help them sleep. He told authorities he put his daughter down on her stomach and covered her halfway with a blanket while his son played with a relative’s cell phone.
Burnett said he went downstairs but returned about five minutes later to check on the children after heard something upstairs. He discovered his daughter was out of bed, so he put her back in bed by placing her flat on her stomach, covering her halfway, he told police.
When confronted with his daughter’s death, Burnett repeatedly said he didn’t cause her injuries and thought they could’ve happened while he was performing CPR on her, records said. He would not, however, submit to computer voice stress analysis because he “wasn’t in the right state of mind to participate.”
Michelle L. Quinn contributed.
