{"id":240226,"date":"2026-05-22T04:37:41","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T04:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/240226\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T04:37:41","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T04:37:41","slug":"brooklyn-mother-who-drowned-3-kids-on-coney-island-beach-sentenced-to-20-years-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/240226\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn mother who drowned 3 kids on Coney Island beach sentenced to 20 years to life"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Brooklyn woman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison on Wednesday for drowning her three young children<\/a> in the ocean near Coney Island\u2019s famed boardwalk.<\/p>\n

\"NBC<\/p>\n

Subscribe to read this story ad-free <\/p>\n

Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.<\/p>\n

\"arrow\"<\/p>\n

Erin Merdy, 34, pleaded guilty earlier this year to first-degree murder charges in the 2022 killing of her 7-year-old son Zachary<\/a>, her 4-year-old daughter Liliana and her 3-month-old son Oliver.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo sentence can fully measure the loss of a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a three-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

A message left with Merdy\u2019s attorney was not returned.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

The city medical examiner\u2019s office ruled their deaths homicides by drowning.<\/p>\n

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

At the time, relatives said she may have been going through postpartum depression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Brooklyn woman was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison on Wednesday for drowning her three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-240226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240226","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=240226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}