Michael Kyaw Htoo was 22 inches long and weighed 10 pounds and 3 ounces on the day he died.
He was just 5 weeks old.
At that age, experts say babies are first beginning to smile, Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Dawn Bakst told a Ramsey County District courtroom during a sentencing hearing held Wednesday for the child’s mother, Shwe Htoo.
Their mothers are encouraged to sing and coo to them, Bakst continued.
“Instead, this defendant fed her child a bottle of poison, let him suffer for hours, and then smothered him to death,” Bakst said.
While acknowledging the 23-year-old mother’s struggles with postpartum depression and other mental health diagnoses, Bakst said medical experts involved in the case concluded that Htoo knew what she was doing Nov. 17, 2015, when she filled her infant’s bottle with a mixture of sleeping pills, sugar and a substance used to kill bedbugs.
When that failed to kill him, she was intentional and coherent when she opted to smother Michael Kyaw Htoo to death with her hands.
She made that decision despite other available options, Bakst continued, such as calling 911 or dropping her son off at the police station, a hospital, or the cathedral.
“There is one person in any child’s life that is supposed to protect you… and that is the mother,” Bakst said. “This mother killed her child.”
Several of Shwe Htoo’s family members, including her husband and Michael Kyaw Htoo’s father, attended the sentencing, where the Karen refugee was sentenced to 15 years in prison on one count of first-degree manslaughter.
The sentence was an upward durational departure due to aggravating factors in the case, including the boy’s young age and defenselessness.
One relative collapsed into her lap and shook during the proceedings.
A charge of second-degree murder previously facing Htoo was dismissed Wednesday as part of the agreement reached between the prosecution and the defense after Htoo pleaded guilty for causing her son’s death in February.
Htoo also cried during the hearing, but declined to speak despite urging from her defense attorney, Barbara Deneen.
Deneen reminded the courtroom about the challenges Htoo had faced in her life before Judge Judith Tilsen delivered her sentence. She watched her parents taken away by the army in what is now Mynamar when she was just five, Deneen said.
She came to the United States in 2014 through a lottery system.
“She has struggled and faced horrors none of us could imagine in this courtroom,” Deneen said.
A legal memorandum filed by the defense said Htoo was experiencing “acute postpartum depression and psychotic symptoms exacerbated by symptoms of PTSD” when she killed her infant.
Shortly after his death, she placed him in a baby carrier, got into a vehicle left behind by her husband, who was away at work, and crashed her car into a light pole on Midway Parkway in an effort to kill herself.
She plastered the walls of the hospital room she was subsequently admitted to at Region’s Hospital with pictures and testaments of love for her son, and has experienced persistent feelings of “remorse and loss” ever since, court documents say.
In a letter she sent to Tilsen before sentencing, Htoo asked for forgiveness.
“That’s not my place to do,” Tilsen told her Wednesday. “You will have to learn to forgive yourself and to ask for forgiveness from your family.”