An Arizona mother who murdered her two kids, ages 7 and 9, using a meat cleaver “designed to cut the bones of animals” will die behind bars after being handed two consecutive life sentences on Friday for her heinous crimes.

Yui Inoue, 44, was sentenced by Maricopa County Superior Judge Jeffrey Rueter, according to AZFamily, and he didn’t mince words when speaking to her.

“Words can’t adequately describe what occurred,” Rueter said, per AZFamily.

“I can’t imagine what those children went through in their last minutes,” he told the court. “The fear, the pain, the suffering. It’s incomprehensible.”

Inoue, who spoke through a Japanese interpreter, said that she believed her children were not dead. She was given the two life sentences plus two 20-year sentences to be served consecutively.

“They are spending time with my parents,” Inoue reportedly said. “I love my children very much so it’s very strange. My children are with my parents.”

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Inoue, who lived in Tempe, was accused of killing her two kids in a heinous 2021 murder case that wrapped up in February with her conviction.

“Mia and Kai Inoue were sleeping soundly in their beds when their own mother came into their bedroom holding a knife, a meat cleaver … and she attacked them with it,” prosecutors said during closing arguments, according to AZFamily. “She had to think. She had to act. And there’s nothing unclear or speculative about any of that.”

A Maricopa County jury found Inoue guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse in connection to a prior investigation by the Arizona Department of Child Safety and the May 2021 murders of her children Mia and Kai Inoue, who were identified by local officials.

Prosecutors say Inoue set upon her two children after claiming to hear “voices telling her to kill” them. She called 911 afterward and then went to flag down officers at a police substation on East Apache Boulevard near Arizona State University. The distraught mother was primarily speaking Japanese, police said, and she reportedly confessed to the officers on the spot about the slayings. Authorities went up to her apartment in response and found the mutilated bodies of Inoue’s kids.

“[S]he was hearing voices telling her to kill her children,” charging documents said.

Inoue later told police that she woke up with blood on her hands around 4:30 a.m. to find her children dead and also covered in blood near a doorway. After that, she said she took a bath and finally “woke up” to the reality of the violence she committed. Her lawyers claim Inoue had no memory of carrying out the killings. According to local ABC affiliate KNXV, Tempe police said a blood-soaked meat cleaver was discovered inside the vehicle Inoue drove to the police substation.

“We are here because this woman tried to decapitate two souls,” said Maricopa County prosecutor Shaylee Beasley during her closing arguments in February, according to the Arizona Republic.

Beasley described in detail how Inoue “delivered chop after chop” to the children while they both “tried to protect their heads.” She reportedly showed close-up photos of the children’s horrific injuries to the jury and claimed their deaths were connected to a bitter divorce she was having with their father.

Inoue’s attorney, Rebecca Felmly, had previously said that she believed there was enough reasonable doubt presented at Inoue’s trial for the jury to deliver a verdict of not guilty. During her first court appearance in 2021, Inoue told the judge “I did not kill anybody” through her interpreter.

“(The medical examiner) likened the amount of force to a guillotine,” Felmly said, according to AZFamily. “She is a very tiny, very slightly-built woman. She doesn’t have the energy, the power, or the strength to cause that type of injury to those kids.”

The child abuse case that Inoue was convicted of stemmed from a report made by Inoue’s husband in March 2021 — just months before the killings — saying Inoue “took Kai” and their whereabouts were unknown. “Police eventually located Ms. Inoue and Kai behind a convenience store,” DCS officials said in a May 2021 statement. “Ms. Inoue was taken to a psychiatric hospital and Kai was returned to his father.”

DCS investigators said they did not observe any “visible signs of abuse or neglect on the children” and the kids claimed “they felt safe with their parents.” The investigation did not find any evidence to warrant removal from the home, according to DCS officials.

Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.

A Missouri couple is accused of nearly starving their 1-year-old son to death, allegedly failing to feed the special-needs toddler despite ample food in the home, with the father blaming their failures on smoking pot and “falling asleep.” Braxton Blevins and Emily Katz were taken into custody earlier this week and charged with one count each of child abuse and one count each of child endangerment, records show.

According to a probable cause affidavit, officers with the Carthage Police Department on March 1, 2025, responded to a call from Children’s Mercy Hospital regarding a 1-year-old male juvenile who had been admitted with “severe malnutrition, starvation, recurrent infections, and failure to thrive.”

Medical personnel told authorities the victim had been hospitalized multiple times in his short life for similar conditions.

“In each instance, when placed under hospital-supervised care and fed according to the prescribed protocol, the juvenile gained weight and improved,” the affidavit states. “Hospital staff stated this demonstrated the victim’s medical complications were treatable with proper care and nutrition, which Blevins was trained on and said he was providing.”

Despite the couple claiming that Blevins had been providing their son with proper care at home and following the prescribed feeding plan, officers said they recovered between 10 and 20 unused bags of the victim’s “Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN)” that was stored in the family’s refrigerator. One bag of TPN, required daily, delivers nearly 80% of the child’s required total daily caloric intake.

The bags were administered through a central line feeding tube.

“The presence of excess TPN supplies indicated the juvenile was not receiving the prescribed nutrition,” police wrote.

While hospital staff told authorities that both parents had completed the medical training required to care for their son’s nutrition needs, but said that each subsequent time the victim was hospitalized, neither parent was “consistently unable to explain the home care provided or account for the juvenile’s weight loss and deteriorating condition.”

The hospital’s safety, care, and nurturing team concluded that there was sufficient evidence that the victim was consistently missing feedings and that his repeated hospitalizations were “the result of Blevins’ neglect.”

A Georgia man “violently squeezed” his daughter to death and then tried passing off her injuries as a result of the two of them “playing” together, telling authorities he was “tossing her in the air and catching her.”

Khaliq Woods, 29, was found guilty of felony murder, aggravated battery and first-degree child cruelty for the 2019 death of his infant daughter, Kamila Woods, at their home in Duluth, the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday.

Prosecutors outlined the case against Woods in a press release Tuesday, announcing that he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Jurors deliberated for 10 hours before finding him guilty.

A 28-year-old mother and a 31-year-old man were arrested in Michigan in the death of the woman’s 3-year-old son, who investigators say was killed in his home nearly seven years ago.

Amanda Maison and Maurice Houle, her boyfriend at the time of the incident, were taken into custody on Friday and charged with one count each of first-degree murder in the 2018 slaying of young Matthew Maison, authorities announced. Houle is also facing three counts of assaulting, resisting, or obstructing a police officer stemming from his alleged conduct during Friday’s arrest.

According to a Friday news release from the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Office, Matthew was found dead in his bed inside of the family’s Port Huron Township home on Feb. 18, 2018. While no details surrounding the circumstances of the arrests were provided last week, the sheriff’s office said that the arrests were made following “significant recent developments” in the investigation into the toddler’s death.

During their arraignment hearing on Monday, prosecutors said that Matthew suffered “years of abuse at the hands of both defendants,” per courtroom footage posted by Detroit NBC affiliate WDIV.

“We came to realize of a scheme where both defendants conjured up this lie of previous injuries to the victim in our case, Matthew Maison, and came up with the lie about how the injury occurred prior to talking to investigators,” Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Josh Sparling said Monday, adding that both defendants “admitted” that the other abused Matthew.

Sparling alleged that Matthew was subjected to “very cruel, torturous abuse and punishment” such as “being placed in timeout on his knees where his head would be banged off the drywall” and being “locked in his room for hours on end without food or water.”

“There was a prior time where Maurice place a pillow over this child’s face and pretended like he was playing, but yet we know from the autopsy that Matthew died from blunt force trauma from all of the injuries he sustained as well as suffocation,” Sparling said.

The proceedings then took on an even more depraved tone as the prosecutor relayed another pernicious allegation levied against Maison and Houle.

“Not to mention this plan that was put forth to kill Matthew to make room for a child the two of them could have together,” Sparling said.

The Macomb County Scanner reported that during the duo’s arraignment on Monday, it was revealed that Matthew was likely beaten and choked to death, with investigators determining that his manner of death was a homicide.

“It is my opinion that Matthew Maison died secondary to blunt traumatic injuries with features of asphyxiation,” St. Clair County Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz reportedly wrote in the autopsy report. “The extent, severity, and distribution of the traumatic injuries is indicative of inflicted trauma.”

Prior to Monday’s proceedings, authorities had not released any details about the boy’s death.

The Times Herald reported that on the morning of Feb. 19, 2018, deputies and emergency medical personnel responded to the Maison residence in response to an unresponsive child in the home. Upon arriving at the scene, first responders found Matthew inside the home, already dead.

The newspaper in February 2020 submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the 911 call placed in connection with the boy’s death, but was told that the recording system for St. Clair County Central Dispatch automatically deletes recordings after one year.

Amanda Maison’s brother, Andrew Maison, and his wife, Hilery Maison, are currently serving sentences of life in prison without the chance of parole for the 2015 murder of Andrew Maison’s 5-year-old daughter Mackenzie Maison. They were also found guilty of severely abusing his 3-year-old daughter, Makayla Maison.

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A mother in California has been charged with murder for leaving her 4-year-old daughter to die in a “partially submerged” SUV after she sent the vehicle careening into an irrigation canal during a DUI crash, with cops later finding the woman “taking a bath while her daughter remained in peril” at the scene, according to prosecutors.

Juliette Acosta, 26, was originally only charged with felony drunk driving for the deadly DUI crash that took the life of her daughter, Reagan Herrin, on the night of March 8 near the town of Hickman. On Friday, the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s Office reported in a press release that Acosta’s charges had been upgraded to murder; vehicular manslaughter; driving under the influence of alcohol causing injury; permitting a child to suffer under circumstances likely to cause great bodily injury or death; and resisting, delaying or obstructing a public officer, peace officer or emergency medical technician following an investigation.

The parents of a newborn baby in Pennsylvania have been arrested in connection with the child’s tragic death after authorities say they didn’t set up a bassinet or crib, instead letting the child sleep in their bed where he died. Ashley Susana Usadel, 31, and Travis Scott Smart, 34, were arrested Thursday morning and charged with one count each of child endangerment in the tragic death of young Zane Scott Usadel-Smart, records reviewed by Law&Crime show.

Usadel is also facing an additional charge of involuntary manslaughter.

According to court documents obtained by NorthCentralPA, officers with the Sunbury Police Department responded at about 2:30 a.m. on April 10 to a home on North Sixth Street in regard to a call about an unresponsive infant. Upon arriving at the address, first responders said they saw the father performing CPR on the child, who was face-up on a bed in the living room of the home, and took over performing lifesaving procedures.

Emergency medical personnel arrived a short while later but were not able to provide any assistance. Zane was pronounced dead at the scene and authorities contacted the Northumberland County Coroner’s Office as well as the county office of Children and Youth Services.

Both parents were reportedly transported to the police station, where they underwent interviews with detectives.

According to a report from PennLive, Usadel said that she laid down in bed at about 9:30 p.m. the previous evening with the baby. She was allegedly holding Zane in her right arm and breastfeeding him while using her left hand to hold her phone and scroll through her TikTok feed. At some point, she said she fell asleep and believed Zane rolled out of her arms and onto the bed. She said she awoke to find him unresponsive next to her on the bed.

A New Jersey mother says she is taking legal action against a day care that has given her no explanation for how her 2-year-old daughter came home last week with one of her “cornrow” hair braids missing from her head — claiming they didn’t know if her child “pulled it out” herself or whether something more nefarious happened.

“You have to use some type of force for a braid to be removed,” Tamara Hemingway told New York ABC station WABC about her daughter, Myla, and what happened to her.

“It was a cornrow so it was braided down to her scalp,” Hemingway said. “There’s no way that, I don’t know who could have done it, but I know for a fact she or a kid would not have done that.”

A Florida woman received quite the surprise Friday afternoon when she saw a dog wandering in her front yard and found an unaccompanied little girl sitting on a chair in her carport. Now the child’s mother, 27-year-old Aquania Aleshia Estes, and her 29-year-old boyfriend Pitrez Floyd are behind bars.

The neighbor called the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office around 4:30 p.m. Friday after discovering the child and dog outside her Deltona home, a press release said.

Per deputies, the girl told the neighbor she was “hot, thirsty and hungry.” She brought the girl food, water, toys and clean clothes as deputies tried to find her parents. Cops posted body camera footage of deputies’ interaction with the girl.

“You don’t know if you live nearby here?,” a deputy asked.

The girl said she wasn’t sure.

“You don’t? You don’t know mommy and daddy’s name?,” the deputy responded.

She gave cops the name “Quana.”

“Why did mommy and daddy drop you off by yourself,” the deputy queried.

The girl said: “They had to go somewhere.”

She didn’t know when they’d be coming back.

More from Law&Crime: ‘Not a viable explanation’: Couple searched ‘dent’ injuries hours before taking infant to hospital with bleeding brain, police say

“Mommy and daddy needed to go charge their cell phones,” the child told deputies according to an arrest affidavit obtained by local Fox affiliate WOFL.

She also said she did not attend school.

Medical personnel responded to the scene to take the girl’s vital signs and they came back OK, per deputies.

Cops tracked down Estes and Floyd some nine hours later, the press release said. Body camera footage showed deputies were incredulous at the situation.

“You leave your kid on the side of the f—in’ road?” a deputy asked.

A Connecticut man is behind bars following the drowning death of his 7-month-old baby boy last fall, authorities say.

Angel Marcus Rodriguez, 29, stands accused of one count of manslaughter in the second degree as well as two counts each of risk of injury to a minor and two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment, according to the East Haven Police Department.

Those charges stem from Angel Josiah Rodriguez’s death — and the alleged harm that could have befallen the boy’s 3-year-old brother.

The incident occurred late in the evening on Oct. 6, 2024, at a house on Redfield Avenue in East Haven — a medium-sized town located a few miles east of New Haven and part of the broader metro area.

A mother in Minnesota is heading to prison for murdering her 23-month-old son by slamming his head repeatedly into a bedroom wall and then lying to police about what happened, claiming he was run over by his father — who happened to have his car in the shop at the time.

“She took my baby’s life,” said Robert Ortez, father of Aaryan, who was killed by his mom Larena Jackson in August 2023. “I still don’t know, to this day, what really happened because she isn’t saying anything,” Ortez told Valley News Live. “I’m still trying to figure out why she did it. I don’t know why[.]”