In 2019, Mercia Sneed smothered her 9-year-old niece with a pillow in Mansfield, Texas. Her capital murder trial ended with a guilty verdict this week in the 396th District Court in Tarrant County.
Amanda McCoy
Simieon Smith was 13 in the summer of 2019 when his mother, Mercia Sneed, sent him out of the media room to a bedroom down and across the hall on the second floor of the Mansfield house where they were staying, likely just for the weekend.
Cardboard boxes lined the hall downstairs. Simieon’s uncle and aunt, Michael and Erin, were moving into the expansive house with a spiral staircase that they were able to buy with money from a car wreck civil settlement.
With petroleum jelly rubbed over her face, perhaps an indicator of her mental illness, Mercia Sneed arrived with Simieon at the house a day earlier after spending about a month at a motel. Michael is Mercia’s older brother.
Never one to stay up late, Michael and Erin’s 9-year-old, Melodi Sneed, remained in a raised area of the media room, asleep on a couch.
Rea’Nessa Robinson, Simieon’s 3-year-old half-sister, was in the room.
As was Mercia.
“I couldn’t see everything fully,” Simieon explained to a jury in a state district court in Tarrant County this week.
He could see Melodi’s body from her waist down.
He saw his mother get up, grab a pillow and get on top of the little girl.
“And she starts suffocating Melodi,” Simieon testified. On cross-examination, Simieon acknowledged that he inferred that smothering was occurring from his mother’s position and hearing muffled screams.
Music from an Xbox played on a television.
When Melodi stopped moving, her aunt stopped pressing the pillow against her face.
Afterward Mercia directed her son to “never tell anyone about her business.”
Simieon returned to playing a video game before falling asleep on the floor. In a recliner, Mercia also drifted off. Both were in the game room. As the sun rose outside, Melodi’s body grew cold nearby.
She was found, stiff, early the next afternoon, as other people in the house began to wake.
Simieon described his mother’s act to one of the first Mansfield police officers who arrived at the house during a time when police thought it was possible the death was the result of a medical problem. Mercia Sneed eventually confessed to smothering Melodi, demonstrating how she pressed her knuckles into the center of the pillow and into her niece’s face.
Several jurors pulled tissues from of a box as Melodi’s mother, Erin, testified, also through tears, about being prevented from touching her daughter’s body at a hospital.
Mercia’s defense attorneys, Bob Gill and Miles Brissette, argued that she was legally insane at the time of the killing. Severe mental disease or defect caused Sneed not to comprehend that her conduct was wrong, they argued.
Kristi Compton, a psychologist hired by the state, diagnosed Mercia with schizoaffective disorder, a serious mental illness.
Mercia had a history of delusions. She falsely told detectives that Melodi had, with needles, pricked Mercia and her children at a church and that her children had been sexually assaulted by another person.
Gill, during cross-examination of Compton, discussed whether his client’s insistence that she can predict future events was an example of a delusion.
“Well, the reality is she’s probably not a prophet, is she?” Gill asked.
“Probably not,” Compton said after hesitating.
A jury in the 396th District Court on Thursday found Sneed guilty of capital murder. Justice Lee Gabriel, who presided at the trial, sentenced Sneed to life in prison without parole, the compulsory punishment prescribed in the Texas penal code in cases in which a district attorney’s office, as it did in the Sneed case, waives the death penalty. The jury also assessed a life term for injury to a child resulting in serious bodily injury, another count on which it found her guilty.
In much of the time since the 2019 killing, Sneed has been held at a state hospital after psychologists concluded that she was incompetent.
Assistant District Attorneys Charles Boulware and Victoria Lydahl prosecuted the case.
This story was originally published August 13, 2026 at 4:25 PM.
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Emerson Clarridge covers crime and other breaking news for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He works days and reports on law enforcement affairs in Tarrant County. He previously was a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and the Observer-Dispatch in Utica, New York.