A 12-year-old girl has been charged with first-degree murder after home surveillance video allegedly showed her suffocating her 8-year-old cousin in a bunk bed they shared at their grandmother's Tennessee home, police said.
Demeria Hollingsworth was spending the summer with her older cousin at their grandma's home in the western town of Humbodlt, according to the dead girl's mother.
"Last time I seen my baby, she was smiling, giving me kisses, telling me she will see me when it’s time for her to come back home," a distraught Rayana Smith told WREG-TV. “She’s never coming back home."
The mom has established a GoFundMe page to help with funeral expenses.
"I just lost my baby, the most beautiful child of God," she wrote on the fundraising site. "The pain I’m feeling is unbearable. I have to now live life without her in this crazy world."
The mother said she was told the cousins had recently been arguing about an iPhone .
“When they told me about that, I should have just gone to get my kid,” Smith said. “But they were having fun for the summer and I didn’t think she would kill my baby.”
ProsecutorFrederick Agee said he is petitioning juvenile court to have the child tried as an adult and he called the case disturbingly violent.
The surveillance video allegedly shows the 12-year-old smothering her cousin with bedclothes, then cleaning up the scene and repositioning her little cousin's body, according to authorities.
"I consider this to be one of the most disturbing, violent acts committed by either an adult or juvenile that my office has prosecuted,” Agee said in a statement on social media.
The girl, who turns 13 next week, is charged with murder and tampering with evidence, the prosecutor said. Because of her age, she has not been publicly identified.
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