Mum drowned her 7-year-old daughter in front of her son as punishment

When seven year old Adrianna Hutto died, her mother Amanda Lewis said she had been cleaning bugs out of the pool, slipped, fell in and drowned.

She also said her younger brother AJ had tried to save her but couldn’t and screamed for help.

Amanda, then 27, called emergency services, appealing for help. But less than an hour later, Amanda’s six year old son AJ started to tell a more sinister story – a story that would lead to a murder trial in which he was key witness against his mother.

While Amanda attended hospital as doctors battled to save her daughter’s life, AJ was in the care of his grandparents.

AJ started to tell them that he had seen his mother drown Adrianna in the pool, using her hand to cover her face and push her underwater.

The grandparents relayed this to the local Sheriff’s Department and they took AJ to be interviewed, all while Adrianna was still alive in hospital.

AJ was interviewed twice that day – August 8, 2008 – by investigators and a child expert and both times he told a story that broadly remained the same: Adrianna had been ‘dunked’ by his mother as a punishment for being naughty.

She’d sprayed window cleaner in the living room over the TV and this had made ‘momma mad’.

In the interview AJ spoke clearly saying his mother ‘dunked’ and ‘drowned’ Adrianna – and even put his hand to forehead showing how his mother did it.

AJ told police, “Mama dunked my sister.”

He described his mother in a fit of anger, incensed after Adrianna sprayed the cleaner fluid in the house.

“She done some stuff that she ain’t suppose so my mama got mad, so she throwed her in the pool,” he said.

His mother, he said, repeatedly dunked Adrianna, drowning her.

He even showed police how his mum had held her hand over his sister to stop her screams.

That afternoon Adrianna died in hospital in nearby Panama City.

Over the next two days Amanda was interviewed three times by the Sheriff’s Dept denying the allegations and even taking a polygraph test, which she later passed

The authorities weren’t convinced though and over the next month the sheriff’s department investigators and the local prosecutor corroborated multiple elements of AJ’s story.

He had told them what he was watching on TV that morning, that he’d seen army helicopters on training flights, workers cutting the trees around power lines outside his home. It all turned out to be true.

It made them certain AJ had a clear memory of what happened that day and was not conflating separate days and events in his description of Amanda ‘dunking’ his sister.

The police also noticed anomalies about Amanda’s home.

The children’s bedroom was squalid – and had a strong stench of urine – Adrianna had ADHD and was still wetting the bed aged seven.

A month after the drowning, Amanda was charged with murder.Amanda’s co-workers at the nursing home testified that Amanda had talked about ‘killing’ her daughter after an incident where she’d vandalised her mum’s car… writing ‘loser’ in permanent marker in the interior.

It also emerged that Amanda lost her first baby – a 16 month old boy named Alex – when she was 17 years old. The cause of death was seizure.

Amanda’s story features in Killer Women with Piers Morgan

Culled from Daily Mirror