Wesley Mathews, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of causing injury to Sherin.
Wesley Mathews, the adoptive father of Sherin Mathews – the three-year-old who was found dead in a Texas culvert in 2017 – has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in his sentence. At his trial for murder, which happened on Monday, Wesley pleaded guilty on charges of causing injury to the child by omission. This charge comes with a lighter sentence than capital murder and tampering with evidence – the other charges against him.
Wesley, who hails from Kerala, had been charged with capital murder after his special needs adoptive daughter was found dead. If he is convicted under this charge, he faces the possibility of a life sentence without parole. However, having pled guilty to first-degree injury to a child by omission, Wesley may get probation or life imprisonment with possibility of parole after three decades.
His guilty plea was apparently not a deal with the prosecutors or a bargain.
Wesley and his wife Sini, who were natives of Kerala, adopted Sherin from an orphanage in Bihar in July 2016. Sherin disappeared in October 2017, and Wesley initially claimed that he had sent her out in the wee hours of the morning on October 6 that year as punishment for not drinking her milk. On October 22, 2017, Sherin’s body was recovered from a culvert under a road about a kilometre from the Mathews’ home. The cause of Sherin’s death could not be investigated as the body had decomposed.