She Fatally Shook Her Infant
A Far Rockaway mother has been sentenced to a decade in prison for violently shaking her seven-month-old daughter, who later died of the injuries she sustained in the September 2010 incident.
The defendant was identified by Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown as Nyemah Nickens, 21, of Mott Avenue in Far Rockaway.
Nickens, who has been held without bail since her arrest in September 2010, pled guilty last month to firstdegree assault and second-degree manslaughter before Queens Supreme Court Justice Robert Kohm who imposed last Thursday, June 7, the determinate sentence of 10 years in prison.
“For those who do not believe that shaking a baby can cause serious and irreparable injury or even death, this case-and [Nickens’] confession- is a grim reminder that caretakers and parents can and do shake children to death. Never, under any circumstances, should a baby be shaken,” Brown said. “For [Nickens], in addition to the lengthy prison sentence she must serve, she must forever live with the knowledge that she -and she alone-is responsible for her own child’s death.”
In pleading guilty, Nickens admitted that, while at her boyfriend’s residence on 165th Street in South Jamaica on the evening of Sept. 4, 2010, she repeatedly shook her crying daughter, Nyla Nickens, until the infant stopped crying.
At 5 a.m. the next morning, Nickens heard her daughter make a crying sound. When she checked on the baby, Nickens observed that the baby was in an abnormal and unresponsive condition.
At the hospital, an examination revealed that the baby had suffered serious injury to her brain. Although the baby underwent a procedure to relieve pressure in her skull, Nyla Nickens succumbed to her injury four days later. According to medical personnel, the infant’s injuries are consistent with the non-accidental trauma of shaken baby syndrome.
Senior Assistant District Attorney Leigh Bishop of the District Attorney’s Special Victims Bureau prosecuted the case under the supervision of Assistant District Attorneys Marjory D. Fisher, bureau chief, and Kenneth M. Appelbaum and Lucinda C. Suarez, deputy bureau chiefs, and the overall supervision of Executive Assistant District Attorney for Major Crimes Charles A. Testagrossa and Deputy Executive Assistant District Attorney for Major Crimes Daniel A. Saunders.
