SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah judge ordered a Vernal woman on Friday to serve at least 25 years and until life in Utah State Prison for suffocating her 3-year-old stepdaughter in 2019.
Both sides had agreed to a recommended life sentence without parole, but 8th District Judge Edwin Peterson said he wanted to enable investigators to determine in 25 years whether or not Mckenley Yadon is still at risk to anyone – especially children could be safely released.
“It is one of the most reprehensible and despicable crimes known to man,” said Peterson. However, he added, “I think we are dealing with a disease condition as someone would think.”
Yadon, 25, pleaded guilty of aggravated murder, a first degree crime, in August as part of an arrangement that saved her from a possible death sentence for the murder of young Arianna Stout.
“Little Arianna’s life has been wiped out in hateful and violent ways,” Uintah County Attorney Greg Lamb said Friday in a hearing held over a videoconference.
On March 14, 2019, police at Yadon’s home in Vernal replied and found the child was unresponsive and had bruises around the ear, court documents say. The girl, who was nearing her 4th birthday, was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a hospital.
Lamb said Yadon later told police they smothered the girl with a blanket to demonstrate how she did so. Fellow inmates in the prison reported that Yadon expressed jealousy of the child and blamed Arianna for her death.
The girl’s father, Aaron Stout, cried Friday when he remembered Arianna running home to greet him when he came back from work on an oil field, sometimes putting on his hard hat and saying, “Let’s go to the Go to work! “
The girl’s family has called her back as the protector of her older sister, who has autism. They said Arianna was also delighted to meet the organ recipient who received her birth mother’s heart after the woman died in 2017.
“I’m just so desperate that someone could be heartless enough to take it out on an innocent child,” said Stout. “I’m trying to get on with my life, but how can you do that when you’re so broken?”
Yadon refused to speak before she was sentenced and said, “No, Your Honor,” in a voice full of emotion.
Defense attorney Rudy Bautista told Deseret News after the hearing that his client had multiple mental illnesses and developmental delays. He said Yadon’s birth parents essentially abandoned her as a child and that she endured long physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.
Bautista said the judge’s decision to give Yadon a chance to leave prison in 2045 was compassionate and a realization that the medical world might one day help Yadon and others like her.
As part of the settlement agreement, and in exchange for her admission of guilt, a remaining charge of child molestation, a second degree crime, was dismissed.
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