A 36-year-old mother in Alabama will spend just over a year behind bars for her role in the death of her 14-year-old special-needs daughter, who died of blunt force trauma to the torso in 2021.
Escambia County Circuit Court Judge ordered Jessica Bortle on Wednesday to serve a sentence of one year and one day for abuse inflicted on Jasmine Singletary, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show. The court credited Bortle with 212 days already served.
Bortle had initially been charged with one count of negligent manslaughter and one count of aggravated child abuse after prosecutors said she became angry at her daughter for acting out and responded by slamming a table into the girl’s abdomen while the child was confined to a hospital bed. But in July, a jury found Bortle guilty of battery, a lesser charge than manslaughter, and child abuse, a lesser charge than aggravated child abuse.
Following the verdict, Nobles vacated Bortle’s battery conviction, saying the charge was “subsumed in the child abuse charge,” meaning the two offenses were merged into one.
Nobles also ordered Bortle to serve three years of probation following her release.
As previously reported by Law&Crime, officers with the Pensacola Police Department responded to a call on July 21, 2021, from the District One Medical Examiner’s Office regarding a homicide at Sacred Heart Hospital involving a 14-year-old girl with a neuromuscular disorder.
According to the probable cause affidavit, the medical examiner told police that the victim had been admitted to the hospital on July 8, suffering from a “closed head injury of suspicious origins.”
She died in her hospital room five days after mysteriously suffering “massive injuries similar to those found on traffic crash victims.”
An autopsy performed by the medical examiner showed that Jasmine suffered two fractured ribs and that her liver had been “ripped open due to blunt force trauma.”
