A New Hampshire teen convicted of murdering his sister-in-law and young nephews was sentenced 60-years to life in prison after defense attorneys sought leniency over his deeply troubled childhood.
Eric Sweeney, 19, received the sentence at a Concord courthouse Friday after he pleaded guilty to killing 25-year-old Kassandra Sweeney and her young sons — Benjamin, 4, and Mason, just 23 months — at their bucolic Northfield home in 2022.
Sweeney was 16 at the time of the murder and living with his older brother, Sean, and Kassandra under their guardianship when he walked into the family kitchen with a handgun and gunned the family down.
Little Benjamin was shot in the head through the hood of a dinosaur costume he was wearing. And just minutes earlier, Kassandra had been filming videos of the boys talking about how much they loved each other and sent the clips to her husband with a text reading “I hope they make you laugh.”
Kassandra was a nursing assistant, and worked at night to take care of her boys. Sweeney fled after the murders and called his brother to claim somebody had broken in and attacked the family.
No motivation was provided for the heinous crime, but Sweeney had been spiraling into such a deep depression in the months before the murders that his brother and Kassandra had become fearful for their lives and requested he be removed from their guardianship.
Sweeney’s defense argued during his sentencing that he had no memory of the events — and suffered from a “broken brain” formed as a defense mechanism from the “immeasurable trauma” he suffered as a boy.
That childhood included being raised by a mother who “dragged him through drug dens and a succession of abusive father figures,” left him begging on the streets for food by age 6.
“He wore shoes with the soles coming apart, and worried that any toys he received for Christmas through Toys for Tots would be sold for drug money,” the defense told the court.
“We are asking the court today to embrace compassion so everyone in this courtroom can move forward with healing,” defense attorney Lauren Prusiner said, raising the prospect that Sweeney may have been intending to kill himself before he panicked and turned the gun on his family.
Some of the family and friends who delivered victim impact statements before the sentence was handed down said Sweeney should have done just that.
“Rot in hell,” said Peg Sweeney, telling how she once considered herself as much the killer’s grandmother as the victims she was related to by blood. “You can erase ‘Gram’ from your vocabulary.”
Some even expressed hope that Sweeney would be attacked by fellow inmates in prison.
Prosecutors asked for a 97-year sentence, with Judge John Kissinger handing down a term he said balanced the severity of Sweeney’s crimes with the grim circumstances of his debilitating upbringing.
Sweeney will be eligible for parole when he is 68 years old around 2075. He was initially charged with first degree murder before pleading to second degree.
The sentence “reflects both the magnitude and nature of his crimes but also provides a path for the defendant — a difficult path — for him to achieve some measure of redemption and rehabilitation,” Judge Kissinger said, according to WMUR.
With Post wires
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