MINNEAPOLIS - On Monday, Hennepin County Judge Jay Quam decided not to send a day care operator to prison after she admitted to attempting to hang a child in her care and then hit two people while erratically leaving that scene in her minivan.
How could the judge not send her away to do time for that?
I sat down with our reporter on the story, Lou Raguse, to ask.
Raguse said he sat in a courtroom for three days and heard two stories.
The story of what Nataliia Karia did when she attempted to hang a toddler and then ran over two people with her van in November of 2016.
And the story of Nataliia Karia's life that led her to that day.
“I know it's easy to see that when you see 'baby hanging' and then she is released with no prison time, it’s easy to be angry," Raguse said of the reaction by the public to the sentence Karia got. "And a lot of people are coming to me in person and social media and telling me so."
But Raguse said you have to hear those two stories to understand why Judge Quam did what he did.
“There was more compassion in that courtroom than I’ve ever seen on a case like this,” Raguse said.
Judge Quam said this is one of the hardest cases he’s ever had – the woman pleaded guilty to attempted murder, that’s a fact, but also factual is she was having a mental health crisis when she did what she did.
“(They painted a picture that) this is a person that never would have done this in a million years if it wasn't for the mental illness and that testimony came from doctors, people who know her and parents who had kids in her day care,” Raguse said.
Also talked about extensively was the abuse Karia had in her life for a long time that led to the breakdown.
“There was testimony that she was in a physically abusive marriage in Ukraine. And her current husband found her through an agency. So, she agreed to move to America and marry him not knowing him, met him once or twice, and then she testified and others that he was verbally and emotionally abusive here and the argument the defense made is that led to the unraveling,” Raguse said.