Inset: Launice Shanique Battle (Raleigh Police Department). Background: The internet casino where Battle gambled while leaving her kids in the car (Google Maps).
A North Carolina mother will spend several years behind bars after she left her young daughters to die in a hot car , letting the toddlers roast inside the vehicle for more than six hours while she went to an internet casino and gambled.
Wake County Superior Court Judge Rebecca W. Holt on Thursday ordered Launice Shanique Battle to serve a sentence of 94 months (just under eight years) to 125 months (about 10 1/2 years) in a state correctional facility for the 2022 hot car deaths of 3-year-old Amora Milbourne and 2-year-old Trinity Milbourne, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
The sentence came after Battle reached a deal with prosecutors in which she agreed to plead guilty to one count of second-degree murder in connection with the children’s deaths. She had initially been charged with two counts of felony murder and was facing a maximum sentence of more than 80 years in prison.
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Court records show that Holt credited Battle with 667 days already served.
In determining Battle’s sentence, records show the court did not find any aggravating factors that could have increased her sentence but did find Battle’s willingness to “accept responsibility” for “criminal conduct” to be a mitigating factor, concluding that “a mitigated sentence is justified.”
As previously reported , officers with the Raleigh Police Department at about 9:38 p.m. on Aug. 27, 2022, responded to the Duke Raleigh Hospital in the 3400 block of Wake Forest Road in regards to the suspicious deaths of two young girls, later identified as Amora and Trinity. The girls were both pronounced dead that evening, and Battle was taken into custody the following morning.
An autopsy conducted by the county medical examiner revealed that the cause of death for both girls was hyperthermia, which is when the human body absorbs or generates more heat than it can release.
“On 8/27/2022, she [Amora] and her 2-year-old sibling [Trinity] were reportedly left in a vehicle parked behind a gambling establishment from approximately 1430 hours to 2030 hours (6 hours),” an autopsy report obtained by Goldsboro, North Carolina CBS affiliate WNCN stated. “It was parked in a possibly partially shaded area. Documented weather for that time was hot, with a high temperature 95 degrees Fahrenheit with skies varying from partly to mostly cloudy with some light rain. Her mother found them unresponsive and drove them to Duke Raleigh Emergency Department.”
The report further showed that the girls had “no body temperature” when they were first found and were already in stages of “mild [body] decomposition.”
Battle’s cousin, Keisha Harris, previously spoke to Raleigh NBC affiliate WRAL, saying that Battle wasn’t a bad mother. She just made a “careless mistake.”
“She was always there,” Harris told the station. “She’s a caring and loving mother to her kids at the end of the day. She’s not a cold-blooded murderer. She’s not a killer.”
However, The News & Observer reported that records from the Wake County Department of Health and Human Services showed that between 2019 and 2022, Child Protective Services opened investigations into Battle three times, with the most recent happening less than two months before the girls died.
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