GEORGETOWN — A woman convicted of causing a brain injury to a 10-month-old boy at a day care site she operated from her home in Taylor was sentenced Friday to 14 years in prison.
Tempest Coulter, 30, wept loudly in court after receiving her sentence and while the mother of the injured boy later spoke to her in court.
“You took away his ability to talk,” Kelly Richter, the injured boy’s mother, said to Coulter. “We believe in the same God. How could you hurt one of his children and why?”
Outside the courthouse, Richter and her husband said they thought the 14-year sentence was fair. Richter said she and Coulter were friends in high school and had been cheerleaders together.
“Going through something with a friend of over 20 years and your child and the whole town that seems to be against you at times was very hard,” Richter said.
She said people blamed her family for causing the brain injuries that her son, Asher Richter, received June 15, 2017. The boy is now 3.
But Cheri Randall, one of Coulter’s cousins, said outside the courtroom Friday that the sentencing was “ridiculous because she’s (Coulter) never been in trouble before.” She also said the jury was biased because there was only one African American on it and that investigators did not consider other suspects.
Coulter was convicted Thursday of knowingly causing serious bodily injury to a child. She faced up to 99 years for the first-degree felony.
Prosecutors Ryan Bownds and Sunni Mitchell asked the jury to give Coulter at least 15 years, saying that was the length of the boy’s childhood that Coulter had taken away from him.
Defense lawyer Todd Dudley asked the jury during sentencing arguments Friday to give Coulter probation or a short prison sentence, saying she was a wonderful wife, mother and daughter except for a mistake she made for a few seconds with the baby.
Dudley asked Coulter, who is married and has three children, to stand up and face the jury at one point during his argument. “Her life as she knows it has changed and the life of Asher has changed, and what makes this case so difficult is how do you punish someone that has lived an exemplary life?” Dudley asked the jury.
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But Mitchell, in her sentencing argument, said it did not matter whether Coulter had lived a perfect life before she injured the baby.
She said “multiple life sentences” were handed to Richter and his relatives after Coulter injured him. “They will forever live with the choices she made,” Mitchell said.
“He will never drive, he won’t dress himself and all those wonderful moments described, including by the defendant herself, about growing up and that she had become a mother and getting married and falling in love; she took all that away from him,” said Mitchell.
Coulter had testified during the trial earlier this week.
Bownds said during the sentencing arguments Friday that, after Asher was injured, his parents sat by his hospital bed for two months before he responded to them.
Coulter initially told Richter’s husband that the baby was throwing his head back while in a bouncer seat so she took him out and he began shaking, an arrest affidavit said. She later told police she was trying to clean house and hold Asher at the same time when he fell, landed in a seated position and snapped his head back, the affidavit said.
None of the stories could explain the baby’s severe brain injury, which doctors said was caused by shaking, according to the affidavit. It said doctors also said the baby would immediately have shown symptoms after the shaking.
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