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 Kansas man allegedly shot his mother and aunt after he was evicted from their home — and then fled to Missouri, where he reportedly confessed to the crime at a pharmacy.

Luke Anthony Howard, 34, was being held in custody in Missouri’s Clay County on $5 million bond, according to reporting from KCTV, a local CBS affiliate. He is awaiting extradition to Johnson County in Kansas, where the county’s district attorney said Howard murdered his mother, Valerie Howard, 63, and his aunt Joyce Austin, 71. According to court documents obtained by KCTV, Howard had been living with the two women and was given an eviction notice by Austin before he allegedly shot them.

An Oklahoma man was sentenced for killing his girlfriend’s grandparents and burying their bodies in their own backyard.

Lucas Anthony Walker, 22, was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison for the murders of Deborah and Larry Dutton, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced in a Friday press release. Walker pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder.

The victims were murdered in their home in Dewey, about 50 miles north of Tulsa, on Dec. 19, 2022.

Their bodies were found the following month in their backyard, reported Andy Dossett of the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.

A 19-year-old man in California allegedly murdered an Orange County couple he owed $80,000 to — executing them separately in the desert with gunshots — before burning their bodies and Teslas to hide the evidence, prosecutors say.

Huangting Gong, of Glendale, is accused of driving around with the victims’ bodies in their Teslas as he killed them both in order last month, starting first with Kuanlun Wang, 37, before setting his deadly sights on Wang’s wife, Jing Li, also 37.

Wang had agreed to meet with Gong at an undisclosed location in the Southern California desert on Oct. 12, according to an Orange County District Attorney’s Office press release and his criminal complaint. Prosecutors believe the two men were discussing what Wang owed when Gong allegedly shot him in the head.