Jodi Brewery, an 15-year-old Briton who was shot dead by a six-year-old boy from France on August 18 on the tenth floor of the Tate Modern Museum in London, has been sentenced to 2019 years in prison without parole.
The president of the court ruled that 17-year-old Jodi Brewery, who suffers from serious psychiatric disorders, acted in a premeditated way, while emphasizing the seriousness of the injuries suffered by the victim, whose life "will never be the same again".
On August 4, 2019, Brewery pushed the boy, who was then 6 years old, from the tenth floor of the museum. The child fell on a roof that was at the height of the fifth floor, thirty meters below. He suffered cerebral hemorrhage and multiple fractures in his spine, arms and legs.
"We don't know if he will fully recover," prosecutor Diana Hir said Thursday.
The defendant, who pleaded guilty, appeared via video at the trial from the Broadmoor High Security Hospital.
Brewery suffers from autism and personality disorder. He was hospitalized in a special institution and a few months before the incident, after an improvement in his condition, he was allowed to go out alone for four hours at a time.
"Not my fault"
On the day of the tragic incident, Brewery initially tried to buy a ticket for the Shard skyscraper, the tallest building in London. As he did not have enough money, he looked for a correspondingly tall building and went to the Tate Modern museum.
The young man approached the boy, who had moved a little away from his parents, and pushed him from the tenth floor. "Yes, I'm crazy," Brewery told the audience at the time, who couldn't believe what they saw.
According to the investigation, Brewery claimed to have heard voices telling him to injure or kill someone. When asked why he pushed the boy out of the building, he replied "it's a big story" and added: "It's not my fault". At the time of his arrest, he had also stated that he "wanted to harm someone in order to appear on television."
The boy managed to speak again at the end of 2019, his parents announced on a website created to raise money for his treatment.
In a statement read out in court by the prosecutor, the boy's parents said that "words are not enough to describe the horror" of the accused's actions. They added that they live in uncertainty about their son's future and stressed that they fear he will never be able to trust anyone.
They also said that their son has been doing physiotherapy for many months but remains weak while living for months in fear and for days he did not move or eat. "The first time he ate again was in January and he is now able to speak little, but he remains very weak," his parents said.
They noted that "he remains in a wheelchair, has splints on his left arm and both legs and spends his days with a corset in his waist."