An Ohio teenager killed a 14-year-old girl after she told him she thought she was pregnant — he reportedly feared he was the father.
In March, 14-year-old Sylvia McGee was fatally shot by a 13-year-old boy (PEOPLE is withholding his name due to his age).
On Wednesday, in juvenile court, the teen boy pleaded true— the equivalent of guilty— to murder, Stark County Assistant Prosecutor Michelle Cordova tells PEOPLE.
Cordova says the perpetrator had told police he and McGee believed she was pregnant with his child.
“That is what I believe got this whole thing started,” Cordova said on Wednesday, according to the Canton Repository. “There was no evidence of any other reason for this.”
But McGee was not actually pregnant, Cordova says, citing an autopsy.
“It’s still not closure,” Carlina Hanley, McGee’s great aunt, told the Repository after the hearing. ”[He] should have just admitted it from the beginning. She didn’t deserve that…She wasn’t that type of a kid. She was upbeat and funny. I just can’t believe that he did that.”
McGee was in the eighth grade at the Compton Learning Center’s Connections Program, WKYC reports.
“[She] was always funny, smiling, nothing ever dragged her down, not one thing,” the victim’s friend Tabitha McCarthy told the station after her death.
Before her death, McGee hoped to become a beautician.
“She talked about owning her own business,” Hanley said, according to the Repository. “She talked about moving to New York and taking her maternal grandmother with her.”
“I knew that she could always excel in life, in anything that she chose to do,” she continued. “She wanted everybody to get along. She wanted everybody to just be friends — that’s just the type of personality she had.”
Attorney information for the teen boy was unavailable Tuesday. He was not tried as an adult because he was 13 at the time of the crime. He accepted a plea agreement that brought an aggravated murder charge down to murder.
As part of the plea, the teen will remain behind bars in a youth prison until he is 21 and will undergo a psych evaluation. If he is deemed a serious youthful offender, Cordova says the boy would face time in adult prison of 18 years to life.
He will be sentenced in January.
Source: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/boy-13-pleads-guilty-killing-213907903.html