{"id":240091,"date":"2026-05-22T01:11:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T01:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/240091\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T01:11:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T01:11:06","slug":"brooklyn-mom-who-drowned-3-kids-in-coney-island-sentenced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/240091\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn mom who drowned 3 kids in Coney Island sentenced"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN \u2014 A Brooklyn woman was <a href=\"https:\/\/brooklyneagle.com\/388116\/mother-gets-20-years-for-drowning-her-3-children\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">sentenced<\/a> to 20 years to life in prison on Wednesday for <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/new-york-city-brooklyn-e4782e2dffc9be2aa4ccf6d539a5d802\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">drowning her three young children<\/a>\u00a0in the ocean near Coney Island\u2019s famed boardwalk.<\/p>\n<p>Erin Merdy, 34, pleaded guilty earlier this year to first-degree murder charges in the 2022 killing of her 7-year-old son Zachary, her 4-year-old daughter Liliana and her 3-month-old son Oliver.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo sentence can fully measure the loss of a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old and a 3-month-old baby, or the grief their loved ones will carry forever,\u201d Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement. He added that the children\u2019s lives were taken \u201cin the most heartbreaking and unthinkable way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Merdy was sentenced by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun.<\/p>\n<p>A message left with Merdy\u2019s attorney was not returned.<\/p>\n<p>The frantic search for the three children began in the early hours of Sept. 12, 2022, after New York City police received a call from Merdy\u2019s relatives, concerned that she intended to harm her kids.<\/p>\n<p>Officers first found the mother, barefoot and soaking wet, 2 miles down the boardwalk from the section of Coney Island where she lived. She repeatedly said that the children were gone and that she was sorry, according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n<p>Hours later, the bodies of the children were recovered from the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean, steps from the boardwalk and about a dozen blocks from the stadium where the Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team plays.<\/p>\n<p>The city medical examiner\u2019s office ruled their deaths homicides by drowning.<\/p>\n<p>The evidence against Merdy included video showing her walking toward the ocean with the children just before 1 a.m., according to the criminal complaint.<\/p>\n<p>At the time, relatives said she may have been going through postpartum depression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN \u2014 A Brooklyn woman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison on Wednesday for&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,119,25851,5533,93288,15312,259,9,24,5325,63],"class_list":["post-240091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-coney-island","tag-danny-chun","tag-eric-gonzalez","tag-erin-merdy","tag-kings-county-supreme-court-brooklyn-supreme-court","tag-murder","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-no-paywall","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}