Online Reporter
LONDON. – Gasping for breath, convulsing and his back arching in pain – five-year-old Garnett Spear’s last moments – caught on CCTV – are heart-wrenching to watch.
His apparently doting mother Lacey Spears sat by his side.
But medics were completely unaware of the unspeakably depraved act she had performed on her helpless little boy just moments before.
When footage of Garnett’s death was shown to law enforcement, it brought even hardened detectives to tears.
But most horrifying of all is that his suffering was caused by the one person who should have loved and protected him – his own mum.
Lacey Spears – dubbed “the worst mother in America” – was found guilty of murdering her little boy by putting a lethal dose of salt in his feeding tube back in 2014.
Spears is caught on the CCTV playing on her iPhone during Garnett’s ordeal, where it emerged in court she’d been searching for “salt poisoning in children” on the internet and posting numerous photos of her son in his hospital bed on socials to elicit sympathy from her followers.
Moments before his medical emergency, he’d been sat up playing and even eating cookies, before she took the helpless youngster to the bathroom – out of view of the camera – holding a white substance in her hands.
Within minutes of bringing him back to the bed, he keeled over and began retching, screaming out in pain and struggling to breathe.
Medics rushed to save him but his extremely high salt level – which doctors said was “incompatible with life” – caused such severe brain damage he later died.
Tragically, little Garnett’s torture had not started in that hospital room.
It emerged Spears, described by the judge at her trial as having Munchausen syndrome by proxy, had been inflicting unnecessary medical treatment on him since birth.
She had subjected the child to years of procedures and hospital visits – including undergoing an invasive Nissen Fundoplication surgery aged just nine weeks old, which prevented him from ever vomiting.
Then aged 10 months old, she persuaded doctors to surgically attach a feeding tube to his stomach – claiming he couldn’t eat.
Multiple witnesses at trial said they saw Garnett eating fine – wolfing down food whenever he got the chance, but Spears insisted he could not eat without the tube, so it remained in place for the rest of his short life – leaving him at her mercy.
She would switch from doctor to doctor whenever one got suspicious of her claims and documented Garnett’s health struggles on online blogs and social media, some of which have been uncovered by The Sun, still online.
Revelling in the attention it brought her, Spears would post multiple photos of Garnett in hospital beds, sometimes just minutes after he’d been brought out of surgery or when he laid unconscious.
Her X account, which remains public to this day, is named “Garnetts Mommy”, with the last post from 2010 reading: “My son is my everything!!! I love him so much :)”
On a blog named Garnett’s Journey, she documented her son’s every moment under the tag line, “Healing takes courage and we all have courage even if we have to dig a little to find it.”
She completely cut out Garnett’s biological father from his life, moving from her home town of Decatur, Alabama, to Florida and then to New York, fabricating a story that her son’s father was a police officer named Blake who died in a car crash.
To this day, Spears has never admitted her role in Garnett’s death – blaming the hospital and the police.
However, poems she has allegedly penned behind bars and sent to a pen pal can be revealed for the first time, and give a glimpse into the mother’s thoughts – and appear to show glimpses of her admitting her guilt.
In one poem, which appears to be written to her son Garnett, she writes “Am not that person today, Give me a chance to show you, Living with daily regret… No longer am the monster, Phoenix rises from defeat, Your love will carry me through.”
She adds: “Forgiveness you have given, Self forgiveness not yet found, I will make you proud Garnett, You will smile down upon me.”
She ends the poem with the verse: “I ‘lub’ you to the moon and all the way to Clearwater, Florida, Peace out, Let me say just one more time . . . Sorry, I always loved you.”
In other poems she focuses on herself and her own “healing” and in one verse her meaning becomes unclear, writing “Looking back – honestly say, I would not have changed a thing, Change everything – everything.”
In the same poem – entitled Journey of Acceptance – she adds: “Cannot justify actions, Can however acknowledge.”
Author and investigative journalist John Glatt came face to face with Spears and did one of the first and last ever interviews with her.
Her vehement denials of the crime were chilling, he said.
“She was very, very persuasive,” he told The Sun.
“I mean it was only because I’d actually sat through the whole trial and seen all the evidence, including the smoking gun – the video of her actually in the hospital when she administers the salt to Garnett, that I knew she was guilty.
“But she was very adamant that she was innocent and was very persuasive. She showed no remorse at all, just a complete denial that she had anything to do with his death.
“She vehemently protested her innocence and explained that she’d been railroaded by police and was in fact the victim in this tragic case.
“She also blamed doctors and nurses at the two hospitals that had treated Garnett in his final days saying they made mistakes and was solely responsible for his death.”
Brazen Spears even moaned about her life inside when interviewed by John, who published the interview in his book My Sweet Angel back in 2015.
“It’s been brutal in here, crimes involving children are considered the worst here,” Spears said in the interview.
“I hear them talking behind my back, calling me, ‘Baby Killer, ‘Child Killer’, and ‘Mother of the Year.’ But I know it’s not who I am.”
“It’s been very hard adjusting to being here,” Spears added.
“You always have to look behind your back and I don’t trust anyone. I don’t have any friends, but I have people to talk to.”
She told John how she liked doing yoga, working out in the gym, taking creative writing classes and reading true crime books while in prison but hated the food calling it “horrible” and “all carbohydrates”. – Sun Club
