Twenty five-year-old, Awena Rutherford who is on trial for fatally poisoning her two children will know her fate tomorrow as the prosecution has closed its case.
The defendant is maintaining that she thought she was buying cold tablets for her children.
“Who would go to the Plaisance Bus Park to buy cold tablets from a man that sells rat poison?” was the question State Prosecutor Tiffini Lyken put to the 12 member-jury during her closing address at Awena Rutherford’s manslaughter trial.
Represented by Attorney Adrian Thompson, she is accused of giving her children, one-year-old Jabari Codogan and four-year-old Odascia Codogan, 2 halves of one carbon tablet which caused their deaths on March 27, 2014.
She also drank two of the same tablets and was hospitalised for several days.
During today’s hearing before Justice Navindra Singh, Jabari Codogan Sr, testified via Skype from Brooklyn, New York that he supported his children even after he separated from Rutherford, and that he communicated with them every day.
He told the jury that he was never told that they were suffering from a cold.
Awena and the children were staying with the defendant’s sister, Monica Sealey and her husband Curt, who both testified that they never noticed the children suffering from any cold symptoms prior to their deaths.
Shaking excessively and in tears the accused said in an unsworn statement today that she loves her children, and that she’s still traumatized from losing them.
She maintained that she never bought rat poison and that the police treated her unfairly.
However, multiple police witnesses maintained that Rutherford repeatedly said she was stressed and had problems and that she indeed gave her offspring the supposed cold tablets.
The jury will deliberate and return its verdict tomorrow afternoon. (Shemuel Fanfair)
