Elizabeth Ramsey, Stepmother, Starved 10-Year-Old to Death, Watched Him Eat His Feces in Desperation (PHOTO)
Aaron and Elizabeth Ramsey Get Life in Prison for the Death of Young Johnathan
Elizabeth Ramsey, stepmother to 10-year-old Johnathan Ramsey, was convicted Wednesday of starving the young boy to death in April of 2011. She and the father of the boy, Aaron Ramsey, fed him military rations of bread and water until he ate his own excrement in desperation and died. Then, they stuffed his lifeless, emaciated body into a sleeping bag and dumped him in an Ellis County creek bed.
Elizabeth Ramsey, 33, was found guilty of injury to a child resulting in death by a Texas jury in only 30 minutes, according to the Associated Press. She won't be eligible for parole for 30 years, while the boy's father, 35, was already sentenced to life in prison.
"Aaron Ramsey is a monster, but the one thing that defense counsel continues to leave out is that his wife, Elizabeth Ramsey, is also a monster," Jason Fine, the prosecutor, told the court on Wednesday, according to the Dallas Morning News. "Those two monsters came together and they take a sweet little boy, their son … and they lock him behind this door, put him on that deflated, dirty mattress and starve him to death."
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The defense argued that the stepmother's only crime was not trying hard enough to protect her stepson Johnathan from his father, but evidence and testimony convinced the jury otherwise. The Ramseys locked the 10-year-old in his room for months and watched him starve, his cheeks getting sunken in until he weighed only 59 pounds. At one point, the two guardians watched the boy eat his own feces because he was so hungry, but continued to feed him small rations of bread and water.
After they found Johnathan dead on his bedroom floor, they dumped him in a rural creek bed south of Dallas and lied to investigators and family members, saying the boy had gone back to live with his mother, Judy Williams. Williams has custody of her and Aaron Ramsey's 7-month-old, but when he and Elizabeth Ramsey moved to Dallas in 2011, she was barred from speaking to Johnathan.
After Williams spent year trying to get in contact with Johnathan and engaged in a fruitless effort to get visitation rights changed by a judge, Edward Ramsey, the boy's grandfather, called police in 2012. The call led to the investigation, and the Ramseys said Johnathan's treatment was due to his misbehavior.
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