Brynnen Murphy being escorted by police in March 2022 (Baton Rouge Police Dept.).
A 23-year-old man in Louisiana will likely spend the rest of his days behind bars for fatally shooting his pregnant girlfriend before driving off with her 2-year-old son and throwing the still-alive toddler off a bridge to his death.
Brynnen Murphy on Wednesday formally pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter and one count of first-degree feticide, authorities announced. Murphy had initially been arrested in 2022 and charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the cold-blooded slayings of 24-year-old Kaylen Johnson and her son, young Kaden Johnson. He was later indicted by a grand jury on second-degree murder charges and his trial was scheduled to begin next week before he reached a deal with prosecutors in the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office.
Murphy’s plea agreement requires him to serve 95 years in a state correctional facility, a de facto life sentence, according to a report from Baton Rouge CBS affiliate WAFB.
Kaden was not Murphy’s biological son, though Kaylen Johnson was pregnant with Murphy’s child at the time of her death.
Prosecutors reportedly said they were motivated to make a deal with Murphy to spare the victims’ family additional pain at trial, particularly given the graphic nature of the case.
“Obviously, autopsies were involved in this, and some of those photographs have to be shown and then just the description by the pathologist of how the deaths occurred, and how the bodies were disposed of, it would be brutal for a family to go through this,” District Attorney Hilla Moore reportedly said outside of the courtroom following the plea hearing. “There’s no other sentence than what he agreed to today, so this is a guaranteed sentence, he’s practically doing life in prison.”
She also said that her office believes the sentence brought justice for the victims, per The Advocate.
“The main goal was to bring justice to the family, but to also keep them out of court from having to go through a trial and testifying in court. And we think this sentence is surely adequate,” she said.
As Law&Crime previously reported, the mother and son had last been seen alive on March 5, 2022, but family members began to fear the worst after they were unable to contact Johnson for nearly a week. The family then reported her and Kaden missing.
Police at approximately 2:40 p.m. on March 11, 2022, performed a wellness check at Johnson’s home on Old Hammond Highway. While there were reportedly no signs of foul play inside the home, police noted that Johnson’s cellphone had been disconnected.
Johnson’s family began to fear the worst when her car was discovered abandoned on a dead-end street with the license plates removed, and an initially uncooperative Murphy reportedly went to ground.
“We found her car without the license plate on it. And from there it raised an eyebrow. One of the guys made contact with him, he refused to give information and disappeared,” a spokesperson for the Baton Rouge Police Department said. “He knew we were actively looking for him. He knew the mom and the 2-year-old were missing. So from there, the family was reaching out. He was out on the streets and he decided to turn himself in.”
When he was arrested, Murphy reportedly confessed to both killings, telling detectives that after Johnson picked him up on March 5, 2022, they got into an argument, the Advocate reported. After Johnson pulled the car over, Murphy shot her in the head two times. The toddler was strapped into a car seat in the back during the shooting. Murphy then reportedly dumped Johnson’s body in a roadside drainage ditch.
With Kaden still in the backseat, Murphy then reportedly drove to a 30-foot elevated bridge on Central Thruway, which is where he tossed the crying toddler over the side. But prosecutors said the fall didn’t seriously injure the child.
“It was determined that Kaden sustained no injuries from being thrown over the bridge,” Assistant District Attorney Jaclyn Christie Chapman said during the plea hearing. “But instead died as a result of starvation and exposure to elements for a sustained period of time.”
Police reportedly said that the mother and son appeared to have been dead for about a week.
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