Teen mother guilty of killing

Without the teen mother’s videotaped confession, the case of an infant’s death might never have reached a courtroom, said attorneys on both sides of the aisle after a two-day murder trial concluded with a conviction Friday.

A Staunton jury found Ashkea Pavielle Johnson, 18, of Staunton, guilty in the premeditated suffocation of daughter Rosaleeia M. Johnson.

Stony-faced throughout most of the two-day trial, Johnson broke when a jury of eight women and four men found her guilty of first-degree murder and attempted murder in the second degree.

She closed her eyes as jurors stated their votes and silently shed tiny tears until one of her attorneys reached for tissues.

Judge Humes J. Franklin Jr. ordered a pre-sentence report be completed before a formal sentencing hearing early next year.

During closing arguments, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Anne Reed asked the jury to consider how methodical Johnson had been in the murdering of her 2-month-old child.

“It's hard to imagine something more deliberate, willful and cruel than a defenseless child being smothered,” Reed said.

Staunton police responded to Johnson’s North Central Avenue apartment Nov. 15 after receiving a 911 call from the teen. When they reached the apartment, they found Johnson, then 17, and her unresponsive baby.

Rescue workers attempted CPR before taking the baby to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville.

Two weeks before, rescue crews responded to the same apartment for an incident in which Johnson said her baby rolled off a sofa.

Reed asked jurors to recall the moment when Inv. Michael King took the stand and pulled a thin plastic bag from an envelope and handed it to a courtroom bailiff.

Johnson kept her eyes locked on the bag as the bailiff crossed the room to enter it as evidence.

Then Reed referred to a videotaped confession, in which Johnson detailed placing the baby onto her lap and pressing the bag onto Rosaleeia’s face. Given the murder weapon, Reed told the jury the killing was “deeply personal.”

“Ashkea felt Rosie moving and kicking,” she said. “Fighting for breath, fighting to live.”

Assistant Public Defender David Smith cautioned the jury about Reed’s assessment of the facts and said she tried to play their emotions.

Smith argued the only evidence Reed presented came from the confession; that authorities never found DNA on the bag retrieved from a garbage can 15 days after the incident

He decried Inv. Chad Nestor’s interrogation, in which the detective isolated Johnson from her family and “systematically broke her down,” Smith said.

During Nestor’s testimony, the investigator said doctors could not conclusively say the baby died from suffocation. It didn’t stop him from using the assumption in his interview with Johnson.

“So when you told my client, ‘They know what you did, I know what you did,’ that wasn’t accurate, was it?” Smith asked.

“No sir,” the detective said.

“You told her that she’d get less time for being truthful?” Smith said.

“Yes sir,” Nestor replied.

Turning to the jury in his closing argument, Smith reiterated points from his cross-examination of Nestor.

“That interrogation was lopsided,” he said. “This interview is the only evidence the Commonwealth has to support any one of these charges.”

Defense witnesses included Johnson’s mother, Erica Johnson, and sister, Latoya Reynolds. They described scenes from the hospital, before Rosaleeia was taken off life support.

“They had Rosie and she had tubes in her,” Erica said. “They were looking at her and Ashkea was there…standing off to the side, upset. I knew she couldn’t take being there because I could barely take being there.”

Erica said her daughter was not present for Rosaleeia’s baptism.

As jurors filed out of the courtroom Friday night, not one looked back at Johnson, who stood with her eyes still closed, still crying.

Smith leaned toward his client and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Reed said estimating a possible sentence for Johnson would be difficult. She said Franklin could sentence her as a juvenile, an adult or a combination of both.

The prosecutor said she felt Nestor acted professionally in getting the confession from Johnson, and that without it, her case would have been “a lot of suspicions.”