Evil step-grandma, 36, gets astonishingly light sentence for 'killing of baby' that shocked America

A 36-year-old step-grandmother accused of beating and shaking an 11-month-old baby to death will not even spend a year in jail.

Shanica Callaghan was sentenced to 364 days in prison by Judge Ushir Pandit-Durant in Queens Supreme Court on Tuesday after striking a plea deal.  

Her husband Clinton's grandson Jeremiah died on September 6, 2017, with a fractured skull and injuries to his brain, neck, and spinal cord.

A medical examiner found the baby died from 'violent, repetitive forces of acceleration and deceleration and significant blunt force trauma being applied to [his] head and body'.

Callaghan, who has three young children of her own, was alone with Jeremiah and claimed he began to choke while she was feeding him.

She was arrested on April 24, 2018, and charged with second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, first-degree assault and endangering the welfare of a child - all felonies.

All those charges were dismissed on October 29 and replaced with a single count of second-degree reckless endangerment - a class A misdemeanor.

Judge Pandit-Durant accepted the plea deal and Callaghan was handcuffed and hauled away to jail, where she will serve her time in protective custody.

Callaghan declined to say anything when asked by the judge and appeared sad but not distressed as the sentence was read out.

'This was a tragedy that happened in a brief moment of time,' Assistant District Attorney George Kanellopoulos told the court at sentencing.

He said Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, a Democrat re-elected in 2023, personally evaluated and approved the plea deal based on criteria he presented.

'The defendant's age, her lack of criminal history, the fact that she's a mother of three other children, that she's married, that she's lived in her home for a long period of time, as well as her immigration status,' Kanellopoulos said.

'All those compound the tragedy of this baby's death, so we believe this is a fair outcome and a just punishment for what happened to baby Jeremiah.'

Judge Pandit-Durant commended the two sides for coming to an agreement after six years and at least 56 hearings since Callaghan's arrest.

'This is a tragedy... it's a shame that the child's life was lost,' she said.

'However, under the circumstances of this case, this court believes that justice has been served.'

Callaghan arrived in court wearing a pink, brown, and blue plaid shirt, ripped blue jeans, and dirty Nike sneakers and without the long braids of earlier appearances.

She was supported by her husband Clinton Callaghan, who is Jeremiah's grandfather.

Callaghan's sentence was the maximum allowed under the charge and prevented her from being deported back to her native Jamaica.

US immigration law only allows for the deportation of visa holders if they are convicted of a 'crime of moral turpitude' punishable by at least a year in jail.

New York approved a law in 2019 that capped many class A misdemeanor sentences at 364 days and a $1,000 fine to avoid long-term non-citizen residents having their visas or green cards canceled for petty crimes.

Callaghan was spared a fine, with only $250 in court costs imposed. 

Judge Pandit-Durant could have rejected the plea deal and imposed a different sentence but had no power to change the charges or exceed the 364-day maximum.

Callaghan's lawyer Christopher Renfroe told DailyMail.com after an earlier hearing that Clinton had claimed 'to all who would listen' that he was the one who killed Jeremiah.

Renfroe said he planned to use this as part of her defense, but wouldn't say on Tuesday if it was what prompted prosecutors to agree to the plea deal.

Clinton has not been charged with any crime related to Jeremiah's death. 

Callaghan spent almost the entire six-plus years since her arrest as a free woman, and photos posted on social media showed her enjoying nights out with friends and family.

Clinton was given sole custody of Jeremiah by the Texas State Department of Family and Protective Services on September 28, 2016, when he was just three days old because the boy's mother, his daughter, was a drug addict.

Callaghan told police her husband’s daughter, Kimberly, had two previous children who were removed from her care and Clinton didn’t want that to happen to Jeremiah. 

FPS agents were already at the hospital ready to remove him when he was born, Callaghan said.

‘Kimberly called me and told me to tell her father to come and get the baby. He flew to Texas and drove the baby back and we have been taking care of him since,' she said.

Callaghan described him as 'a happy baby' who had no known health issues in a police interview hours after he was rushed to the hospital.

‘He was fine. He was fine all day and then just started vomiting. Look at him, these are pictures from the park. He was fine, he was happy and smiling,' she told police. 

Court documents detailed how Jeremiah was rushed to hospital after returning from a family trip to Brookville Playground in Rosedale, Queens, about 6pm on August 31, 2017.

Clinton carried Jeremiah on a harness strapped to his chest, and let him play in the park along with their three older biological children.

He told police in his own interview that Jeremiah was ‘playing normally’ at the playground and didn’t suffer any trauma.

They left about 7.30pm and Callaghan carried the baby while Clinton walked ahead of her with their three children, who pushed their bikes along the sidewalk. 

Clinton stayed outside their apartment on 144th Avenue near 231st Street in Springfield Gardens to put the older children's bike away and put the stroller back in the car, when Callaghan took the baby inside to feed him.

Callaghan told police she carried Jeremiah in her arms and changed his diaper right away, then got his bottle with him in her hands, and gave her son and daughter money to buy ice cream while feeding him. 

‘I didn’t do anything different when I fed Jeremiah, I didn’t leave him alone while I was eating, I was holding him,' she said. 

‘I put the bottle down and was smoothing his stomach, trying to get him to burp.'

Then she picked up Jeremiah and held the bottle as he drank formula milk, but as she was walking to the living room, he began to choke.

‘As I was feeding the child, he began to choke. I saw that he couldn’t breathe and I yelled for my husband,' she told police in a second interview the next morning.

'Jeremiah became worse, I told my husband to call 911. I put Jeremiah on my lap and tried CPR, the 911 operator was helping me through the CPR.’

Callaghan said she had recently passed a nursing course to work in aged care homes, so she used that training to do CPR with help from the 911 operator.

She said she put him on the table and kept trying CPR until the ambulance arrived.

Detectives wrote that Clinton in his interview said that ‘upon entering the house, he observed [Jeremiah] vomiting and gasping for air’ about 7.46pm.

Callaghan told police that Jeremiah was only fed through bottled formula and when she once tried to feed him carrots and meat, he spat it up. 

He drank a 90z bottle of Similac Sensitive formula three times a day on advice of his pediatrician because he was spitting up regular Similac, and hadn't had any issue with it since ‘a while ago’.

She said he could hold a bottle on his own, but she was holding it for him at the time he began to choke. 

He could sit up on his own but not stand, even if assisted. ‘Jeremiah has been a bit slow and delayed in his development,' she said.

Jeremiah arrived at Jamaica Hospital at 8.19pm in cardiac arrest and was put on life support, then transferred to Cohen Children’s Medical Center.

Court documents stated the baby got a complete medical workup from the Child Protection Team and ‘there were no signs of external injury or trauma’ to his head or body.

Callaghan denied ever abusing him, or any doling out physical discipline when he was ‘cranky, stubborn, or not eating’ or for any other reason.

However, the autopsy by Medical Examiner Michael Greenberg two days after Jeremiah died at 9.27pm on September 6, 2017, told a very different story.

Greenberg found a skull fracture, subdural and subarachnoid hematomas (bleeding on the brain), a traumatic brain injury and multiple traumatic injuries to his neck and spinal cord.

There was also extensive retinal and optic nerve sheath hemorrhages in both eyes, and a split retina in his left eye.

He ruled the cause of death was 'abusive head trauma including… violent, repetitive forces of acceleration and deceleration and significant blunt force trauma being applied to [his] head and body'.

Jeremiah wouldn’t be in normal or good health after the injuries were inflicted and his ‘symptoms of vomiting, difficulty breathing, and unresponsiveness would have occurred immediately or almost immediately after the infliction of the injuries’, Greenberg wrote.

The ME wrote that his findings were inconsistent with Callaghan saying there was no history of trauma.

'In a heart-breaking turn of events, the baby boy that today should be learning how to walk and talk is dead and buried,' then-Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said at the time.