Santee Mom on Minimum 9-Month Sentence for Baby-Shaking: ‘Ridiculous’

Updated at 8:35 a.m. March 19, 2012

Sophie Crew of Santee stood only feet away Thursday from the veteran day-care provider who in September 2009 shook Crew’s 13-month-old daughter Emma to the edge of death.

With two dozen friends and family members packing an El Cajon courtroom, Crew told Superior Court Judge John Thompson how Patricia Bernal’s near-fatal action led “our family to crumble”—including a pending divorce.

“Our perfect family home—that Emma came home to at birth, and that I had dreams of watching Emma and her sister grow up in—is now on the market,” Crew said in a 10-minute appearance at Bernal’s sentencing hearing.
“You have ruined our dream of having a big, happy family in our wonderful house.”

Her voice breaking with emotion, Crew read a 1,900-word statement (attached) and often addressed a seated Bernal to her right on the other side of a defense lawyer. Crew begged for a longer sentence than the plea bargain her family said the judge insisted on.

A 12-year sentence was possible for counts of felony child abuse and severe injury, the family has said.

“Judge Thompson, with a sentence of 365 days with probation, this person who caused Emma a lifetime of difficulty and losses, who destroyed our family and who caused so much permanent damage in her world, would be out in 6 months.  Six months,” Crew told the judge.

Crew—who left her Monte Vista High School teaching job to care for Emma—called six months “exactly the amount of time that Emma went without half of her entire skull.”

Thompson conceded: “There’s no question this is an unusually difficult case for the court. Frankly, there’s no amount of time I can impose … [that would make you] feel any way vindicated.”

But he cited Bernal’s lack of a criminal record and her more than 30 years without complaint in the child-care business in giving her a year in County Jail.

Bernal made no statement.

Thompson said Bernal would serve at least 270 days in jail [likely La Colinas in Santee]. 

Thompson also ordered her to pay a $200 restitution fine, and $1,300 was ordered to the State Victim Compensation Board to cover some of the victim’s medical expenses, said Bill Barlow of the District Attorney’s Office Restitution Enforcement Unit.

But according to a court order (attached) that listed other fines and fees, Bernal will have to pay a total of $6,224, including $5,000 as a child abuse restitution fine.

The judge appeared to defend the plea deal, saying the issues “would have confused the trial court” had the case gone to a jury. And he said a Probation Department report on Bernal recommending a light sentence played a part in his verdict.

“I have to take into account all the information from both sides,” Thompson said of the “brokered settlement” during the half-hour hearing.

Bernal’s eyes never met Crew’s. Only once did Bernal look toward the lectern—when Crew showed her 6-year-old daughter Ava’s drawing of her sister when she was recovering at Rady Children’s Hospital.

Otherwise, the brunette Bernal, 62, quietly stared ahead, toward the front of the court. She wore a gray sweater over a white blouse on her last day of freedom until mid-December 2012 at the earliest.

After the hearing, friends and family hugged Crew, 33, who also was comforted by her French-born mother, Danielle van der Gheynst; her father, Enzo; and her husband, Tyler, whose divorce case was filed a month ago.

“The people who do this are not hardened criminals,” Sophie Crew said after the hearing. “They are people who lose it. [But] in the past 2½ years, she kept making the wrong choice every day of not coming forward and admitting to what she had done—and being a responsible human being.”

Crew said: “It’s ridiculous that she gets not even a full year.”

Said Emma’s father, Tyler: “It’s a bad deal. It should have [gone] to trial, and I would have taken my chances” to achieve a longer sentence. But he blamed Thompson for the plea bargain, saying the family didn’t have the option of going to trial.

Tyler Crew said deputy district attorney Claudia Grasso told the family “it was up to the judge, [who] took a deal with the defense.”

Wiping his face, Tyler said Bernal was “partly responsible” for the breakup of his marriage.

Sophie’s father said he was disappointed in the Bernal verdict, “but she will live with the remorse for the rest of her life.”