Two teenagers charged with conspiracy to murder Eastpointe girl’s mother
A 14-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy have been charged as adults with planning and attempting to kill the girl’s mother, prosecutors said.
The boy entered the girl’s Eastpointe home in the middle of the night on July 24 and began strangling her mother and shoving a pillow over her face before the girl’s grandmother interrupted him and saved the mother’s life, said Macomb County Prosecutor Pete Lucido.
“If the grandmother hadn’t gotten up, the mother would have been dead,” Lucido said.
The boy took off his shoes to go into the house, Lucido said, and ran out of the house when he was disturbed without shoes.
The 14-year-old was charged with solicitation of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, with bail set at $1 million. The 17-year-old was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder, with bail set at $2.5 million.
The teenagers will be tried in adult court and face life sentences if convicted. Their names have not been released.
“If you commit adult crimes, you face adult consequences,” Lucido said.
The Macomb County District Attorney’s Office struggled to decide whether to charge the two as juveniles or adults, Lucido said, because the 14-year-old’s mother did not want her daughter to be charged as an adult.
“My juvenile court chief, who has worked in the district attorney’s office for over 20 years, said to me, ‘I don’t know what to do here. The mother doesn’t want her daughter to be charged as an adult, even though this is an adult crime,'” Lucido said. “I look at the mother and say, ‘That’s her daughter who wanted her dead.’ That’s what’s being alleged, and it’s pretty much in text messages and everything. … We need a psychologist or psychiatrist to look at this case and tell me if we’re in this for the long haul and if the mother or society is at risk.”
