A northern Illinois woman has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for beating her five-year-old son to death.
WOODSTOCK, Ill. – A northern Illinois woman who subjected her son to years of physical and emotional abuse that culminated in his beating to death last year was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Friday.
JoAnn Cunningham pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in December for the murder of her son, Andrew “AJ” Freund. Eight months earlier, police discovered the boy’s battered body, wrapped in plastic and hidden in a shallow grave near the family’s home in Crystal Lake.
Cunningham, his face covered in a surgical mask, did not visibly react in the courtroom after McHenry County Judge Robert Wilbrandt’s ruling.
Cunningham faced between 20 and 60 years in prison. She pleaded for mercy before the judge on Thursday, portraying herself as a loving mother who misses her son.
Wilbrandt acknowledged that Cunningham had a “difficult life”, including drug addiction despite efforts to obtain treatment.
“She went back to living in what can only be described as drug crap: lying, cheating, and manipulating her life while terrorizing her young son,” he said. “While her addictions do not justify her egregious behavior towards her own son, perhaps they do help explain why she participated in … the course of inhuman, repulsive, and downright shocking behavior that ended her son’s young life.”
Prosecutors asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence of 60 years for the 37-year-old mother to die in state prison. Wilbrandt said she believed Cunningham did not plead guilty to one count of senseless cruelty or one charge specifying that she intended to kill her son.
In a statement released by their lawyer on Friday, family members said they were disappointed in the sentence.
“AJ was an innocent and precious child who had his life taken after he endured what we now know was a lot of pain and suffering,” the statement said. “We expected JoAnn to pay for that by spending his natural life in prison.”
Prosecutors presented evidence that Cunningham physically and emotionally abused AJ for years before the beating that killed him. A police officer who went to the family’s home after AJ was reported missing reported the stench of the trash-filled house.
McHenry County State’s Attorney Patrick Kenneally said AJ died alone, padlocked inside his room as his brain swelled and his own blood suffocated him.
Court documents tell of a boy who was in danger all his life. Tests at birth revealed that he and his mother had opiates in their systems, prompting the state Department of Children and Family Services to detain the baby before returning it to them about 20 months later.
The family home was repeatedly visited by state child welfare workers who concluded that there was no reason to remove AJ.
Wilbrandt said he hoped that examining the “missing signs and history” in AJ’s case would save other children “the horrible result.”
“Miss Cunningham was responsible for that life and must now be responsible for her death,” he said.
AJ’s father, Andrew Freund Sr., 61, has been charged with first-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
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