How long was Kristel Candelario sentenced to for leaving her toddler home alone to go on vacation for 10 days?

Content warning: This case deals with parental neglect resulting in infant death, please take caution.

There are horrible ways to die, and, in the summer of 2023, Kristel Candelario, 32, put her daughter Jailynn through a torturous last few days that left everyone in this case, law enforcement, attorneys, and medical examiner alike, traumatized.

It does remind you that the professionals working on these cases are all human. And that these human beings had a hard time grappling with and wrapping their head around how a mother could ever put her 16-month-old daughter through one of the most horrific, slow, and painful ways a toddler could die. This was not her first child, she had another daughter, which means she wasn’t even an inexperienced mother to begin with, not that that would serve as an excuse.

One-year-old Jaylinn died with her own fecal matter in her mouth, as, in a desperate attempt, she had tried to eat the only thing available to her over the 11 days she was home alone while her mother enjoyed a blissful vacation in Puerto Rico. She was severely dehydrated when she died, her cause of death was starvation and water deprivation. When she found her daughter dead in the pack-and-play where she left her unattended for over a week, Candelario replaced Jailynn’s soiled clothes with fresh ones before calling the authorities to her house. This action obviously shows some presence of mind and an attempt to make herself look less like a monstrous mother.

The bond between a mother and her child

Kristel Candelario pled guilty. It was clear that she and her family, both her parents who pled their daughter’s case in court with the help of a Spanish-to-English translator, were expecting and hoping for some leniency.

The defense attorney’s strategy – even he seemed to struggle with the grim facts of the case – was to admit to the guilt but defend that his client’s untreated mental health issues, anxiety, and depression, were mitigating factors in this case.

The prosecutor didn’t think that was enough of an excuse. She stated, as assertively as the case demanded: “The thought of this child, dying every day, while she is having fun, humanity can’t stomach that.”

And neither could the judge, like everyone who had been connected with this case. Judge Brendan Sheehan took note of how the professionals who’d worked this case were present in force in the courtroom for Jailynn to see justice being done for that poor baby. It was the ultimate act of betrayal from a mother to her child, and the judge treated it as such.

Judge Sheehan said that, if the daughter spent the last of her days alone and imprisoned, the neglectful mother should experience a comparable fate. Only, she, unlike her daughter, will be fed in prison.

Attending to this logic, he sentenced Kristel Candelario to life in prison without the possibility of parole.