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.

Jurors in North Carolina have convicted a man for murdering his mother and injuring his father in a beating he claimed was fueled by drugs and sleep deprivation.

Christopher McCullough was found guilty of first-degree murder Friday in the 2023 death of his 75-year-old mother Mary McCullough. Local ABC affiliate WTVD reported that McCullough was not convicted of other charges, included the attempted murder of his father and larceny of a dog.

He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The jury had deliberated for around seven hours after receiving the case on Thursday.

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The defendant’s father, John McCullough, testified against his son. According to a courtroom report from local CBS affiliate WNCN, the father told jurors ever since his son was seven, he was “uncontrollably violent” and had “superhuman-like strength.” They tried everything to treat his issues from sending to boarding school to stays at mental health hospitals. None of it worked. Eventually, he and his wife and obtained a domestic violence injunction against him and forbade him from entering their home.

But he ignored that order and entered the home on Aug. 8, 2023. He reportedly told jurors he was high on Adderall and other drugs and hadn’t slept in six days. He said he asked his parents for gas money. When they refused, he began beating his father — all in the presence of his 4-year-old son — though he did not admit to hurting his sickly mother, who used an oxygen tank and weighed just 100 pounds.

“Me and my dad got in a fight, I struck him twice to the ground, I noticed that my mother was face down,” he said, according to local NBC affiliate WRAL.

The younger McCullough then took his son and fled. Cops rushed to the home to aid the elder McCulloughs. There was blood everywhere and both victims were unconscious, cops testified.

“I noticed she had bruises and cuts on her arms,” Raleigh police Officer Phillip Merle said, per WNCN. “Because of the way she was laying, I noticed she had a large puddle of blood underneath her neck. My training officer asked who did this to her. And she was able to grunt out, ‘My son’.”

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She was rushed to the hospital where she died nearly a week later.

Christopher McCullough’s son, now 6, was not physically injured in the incident but has experienced post-traumatic stress disorder from witnessing the incident.

“[The boy] has disclosed witnessing the defendant hurting nanny and poppy,” his therapist Tara Pawlyk reportedly testified. “That poppy was on the ground while the defendant covered his mouth, limiting his ability to breathe. He has also disclosed nanny was laying on the stairs, [which] the defendant had bashed her head against repeatedly.”

A Florida mom is accused of neglecting her kids after neighbors allegedly found two unclothed toddlers wandering alone on the sidewalk near her home.

Heidy Teressa Diaz-Torres, 25, is facing a charge of felony child neglect with no great bodily harm, according to Miami-Dade County court records. The children, ages 1 and 3 years old, were found on Tuesday by two women who spotted them in the 700 block of West 37th Street in Hialeah, a city just northwest of Miami. Local local ABC affiliate WPLG, citing a police report, said that the women told officials that one of children was able to tell them where they lived, and the women walked them to their home.

A mother in Indiana has been accused of bringing a gun to a school where her daughter used to be enrolled as a sixth grader in an attempt to confront a teacher over the educator’s curriculum.

“Your a child predator [SIC],” wrote Carrie Rivers, 48, in an alleged Facebook message to the teacher after her arrest last week, according to local NBC affiliate WTHR.

The Indianapolis mother allegedly told police that the educator gave her daughter an assignment that she didn’t approve of, which covered same-sex relationships and marriages. The teacher said it was actually an assignment about flags, and that a rainbow LGBTQ flag was brought into class with the words “be kind” on it, along with several flags from other countries.

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.

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.

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“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 mother found stabbed to death at a Utah vacation home last month was killed by her own teenage daughter and her friend, police said.

In a press release from the Washington County Attorney’s Office, the Washington City Police Department provided the names of two suspects identified as the alleged killers of 47-year-old Andreea Mottram. Mihaela Gabriela Sorescu, 16, who also uses the name Bella, is Mottram’s daughter. The other suspect, Abigael Paige Flanagan, 17, who also uses the name Jay, was also staying at the home at the time. Police said in probable cause affidavits for both girls that they are “unaccounted for at this time.”