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SALT LAKE CITY — A teenage mother has been sentenced to 15 years to life in prison after being found guilty of snapping the spine of her 2-year-old son.

Adrianna Lucero was sentenced in 3rd District Court on Friday. She was found guilty of first-degree murder and second-degree felony child abuse or neglect during a trial in April.

Utah Medical Examiner Todd Grey testified that the boy's spine had been snapped. Lucero was 17 when the boy died Aug. 24, 2008.

Before she was sentenced, Lucero told the court that she didn't kill the boy and that she's wrongly being held responsible.

Lucero also was sentenced to up to 15 years in prison on the child abuse count, but the judge set that term to run concurrently with the other sentence.

Adrianna Lucero Bent Her Baby Backwards
« on: September 09, 2008, 08:52:23 am »

Kearns, Utah - I can’t imagine it’s easy, being seventeen years old and a mother of three. Especially when two of them are infant twins, and one is a two-year-old. But what Adrianna Lucero did is so heinous it hurts me to write it. Lucero, 17, is accused of bending her two-year-old son Alejandro Lucero backwards until his spine snapped in half, killing him.

Yeah, you heard me.

Alejandro’s back was broken on August 24, but the cause of death was so unusual that it took a little while for investigators to get their case together. Lucero called paramedics to Gonzalez’ home on the evening of the 24th. She said that she and Gonzalez had been watching a movie with the three babies when Alejandro went into sudden, unexplained cardiac arrest.

Sergio Martinez-Gonzalez is the twins’ father, but not Alejandro’s. He said that Alejandro had asked for Jell-O. When Lucero took him into the kitchen, everything seemed fine, but when Adrianna came back, she reported to Sergio that Alejandro was pale and shaking.

Lucero’s story kind of lined up at first - she corroborated the Jell-O - but said that Alejandro’s eyes just suddenly rolled up in his head and he fell down unconscious. Later she said she’d taken the toddler to the laundry room, but couldn’t describe what had happened there. Her son had been sickly for awhile, Lucero said, and she had taken him for medical attention a week earlier when he had suddenly stopped walking.

At Alejandro’s autopsy, the reason for his death and his prior inability to walk became clear. The baby had been slowly bent backwards in “an unnatural wayâ€