A 37-year-old Alabama woman will be imprisoned for the rest of her life for the strangling and slitting deaths of her two young sons.
Sarah Tapia Franco was sentenced to two life terms in a state prison on Thursday by Cullman County Circuit Judge Martha Williams for the killings of three-year-old Alvaro Garcia and nine-year-old Taylor Garcia, according to official statements.
Franco entered a guilty plea to two counts of capital murder in connection with the deaths of the children this month, following his grand jury indictment in early 2020. A second count of capital murder of two or more people was added to her indictment, but it was eventually dismissed. Her life sentences will begin to serve simultaneously, or concurrently.
In a press release announcing the sentence, District Attorney Champ Crocker stated that, “There is no amount of punishment that would be enough or harsh enough for Sarah Tapia Franco. I am confident that she will never see the light of day again.”
About 60 miles north of Birmingham, Alabama, in a rural location, was where the nightmare started about five years ago.
On Saturday, October 12, 2019, in the afternoon, Cullman County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a report at a residence in the 4000 block of County Road 1718, according to the authorities. First responders reported seeing a graphic scene when they arrived at the scene.
“You know, in law enforcement, there’s things you can prepare yourself for, and there’s things you can’t prepare yourself for, and this is an incident that you can never prepare for,” Cullman County Sheriff Matt Gentry stated in a press conference. “When deputies arrived, we set up a perimeter, and in that perimeter search we deployed our K-9. Our K-9 led us through an open field that adjoined the house, there’s some neighboring farms, in the field we were able to locate one Sara Tapia, which is the mother of the children and the person that we have in custody. We did locate a knife and there were multiple self-inflicted wounds on her.”
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