Gina Emmanuel appearing in court during her April 2025 murder trial in Miami, Florida (WTVJ).
A 56-year-old former registered nurse and foster mother in South Florida will spend the remainder of her days behind bars for killing her 7-year-old adopted daughter, after beating, starving, and ultimately torturing the young girl to death while nearly forcing the victim’s siblings to suffer the same fate.
A jury in Miami-Dade County on Tuesday found Gina Emmanuel guilty on one count of first-degree premeditated murder in the horrific 2018 slaying of young Samaya Emmanuel, records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
Emmanuel was also found guilty on two counts of aggravated child abuse over the treatment of Samaya’s siblings, who were 5 and 12 years old at the time of Samaya’s death. All three children were initially being fostered by Emmanuel before she formally adopted them.
“The guilty verdict in Gina Emmanuel’s first-degree murder and child abuse trial brought to the light of day the horrors 7-year-old Samaya so tragically suffered before her death,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a statement following the verdict. “No one could ever imagine that a trained nurse would beat, torture, and starve Samaya and her two adopted sisters as a means of instilling the defendant’s vision of discipline. The jury fully understood that she ultimately ignored the suffering of young Samaya which led to this child’s death.”
The tortures Emmanuel inflicted upon her children included forcing them to eat human feces, intentionally burning them on the stove, chaining them in chairs, physically abusing them, and withholding food and water, among other forms of torture, Miami NBC affiliate WTVJ reported.
According to the report, Emmanuel’s now-18-year-old adopted daughter provided emotional testimony about the horrors she and her sisters endured at the hands of their foster mother during the three-day trial that ended Monday evening.
“She would chain us, she would have us lay down, she would chain us and lock us until she got back,” the daughter reportedly told jurors.
“One should admire the courage it took for Samaya’s sister, 12-years-old at the time of the abuse, to come forward and testify in court, before judges, lawyers, jurors, and others in order for the truth to be told,” Rundle said. “The prosecution team of Assistant State Attorneys Cristina Diamond and Kristen Rodriguez deserve congratulations for performing a superb job of bringing all the distressing evidence and testimony to the attention of the court and the jury.”
During the trial, prosecutors said that Emmanuel was fixated on being in control of every aspect of her daughters’ lives and enforced her rules through heinous abuse, Miami ABC affiliate WPLG reported.
“You will learn through this trial about the defendant’s control,” prosecutors reportedly said during opening statements. “You’ll hear she kept her refrigerator chained. These three girls were forced to urinate and defecate in a bucket. They were malnourished, whipped and didn’t see a pediatrician. What else was going to happen as a result of the choices she made?”
Emmanuel’s defense attorney reportedly claimed that the registered nurse engaged in “reasonable corporal punishment” that did not amount to child abuse, asserting that Samaya’s death was mostly attributable to untreated diabetes.
“Should she have taken the child to the hospital? Yes, absolutely, but it wasn’t murder. It was not child abuse,” her attorney reportedly told jurors.
Emmanuel is scheduled to appear in court again for her sentencing hearing on April 30. She faces a mandatory sentence of life in a state correctional facility without the chance of parole.
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