A Georgia jury deliberated for just two hours before returning guilty verdicts on 21 counts for a woman accused of killing her partner’s 8-year-old child with autism and abusing her other two children.
Brittany Hall is still awaiting trial for the death of Amari Hall, but Celeste Owens was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 235 years after the jury found her guilty on charges that included malice and felony murder, aggravated assault, cruelty to children, making a false statement, and concealing the death of another, WAGA reported. The sentences are to be served consecutively.
“This is by far the most heinous evil I have ever seen in my entire career, and I do not understand it,” Gwinnett County Judge Angela Duncan said during the sentencing. “You will never see the light of day to perpetrate this type of behavior, cruelty, and evilness upon another person.”
Brittany Hall reported her daughter missing on November 20, 2021, prompting an intense search for the girl. Her body was found three days later in a wooded area miles from her home, as CrimeOnline previously reported. Court documents said that Owens hit the girl in the head several times on November 19, then “conceal[ed] the death of Amari Hall by placing her in trash bags and dumping her body” with Hall’s help.
Owens was charged with several child cruelty charges stemming from incidents involving other children in the family allegedly caught on security cameras. Hall is also accused of hitting and slapping the other children.
Hall initially said that Owens was responsible for all the abuse and her daughters death, but investigators soon learned otherwise, including from interviews with Hall’s other two children.
“My heart is empty. I miss Amari every day,” the victim’s grandmother, Barbara Wright, said during the sentencing hearing immediately following the verdict, according to WAGA. “My heart is broken in millions of pieces that I have not been able to put back together,” she said.
Owens’ defense attorneys called no witnesses and instead tried to sell the jury on a lack of evidence that their client was responsible for the murder. But prosecutors presented testimony from witnesses and even some video evidence. And Gwinnett County Associate Medical Examiner Dr. James Claude Upshaw Downs testified that the little girl died from multiple blunt force injuries “in multiple locations, in multiple stages of healing” and that malnutrition and battered child syndrome contributed to her death.
