A 22-year-old Maine man has received a life prison sentence after he suffocated, burned, then dumped the body of his 14-year-old Christian girlfriend at a Brooklyn beach last year because she refused to get an abortion.
According to the New York Post, Christian Ferdinand admitted to killing of his underage girlfriend, Shaniesha Forbes in January 2013 and had hoped to get sentenced to community service for it.
"Do you think I can get some kind of community service?" Ferdinand reportedly asked officers shortly after he confessed, according to court files. However, on Monday, a Brooklyn jury took just an hour to pronounce Ferdinand guilty and that he should spend the rest of his life in prison.
Forbes, who was a freshman at the Academy for Young Writers in Williamsburg, reportedly told Ferdinand that she was pregnant in a text, but refused to have an abortion due to her Christian mother's belief that life is sacred..
"We are in the church and we don't do those things. The whole family is Christian. Her mother is Christian, everybody is," explained Forbes' grandmother, Daisy Smith, who was also in court for Ferdinand's sentencing Monday.
However, Ferdinand insisted the young girl get an abortion, texting back, "My n-a, are you serious? Kill that s-t."
According to court documents, Ferdinand became enraged when Forbes continued to discuss the pregnancy while they were lying down on a couch at his cousin's home. He used a leather pillow to suffocate her.
He then stuffed her corpse in a suitcase after dousing it with Axe body spray and setting her on fire. He later dumped Forbes' charred body in Gerritsen Bay, Brooklyn.
"She tried [to fight back], [but] wasn't much of a struggle, she was little," Ferdinand told the court.
'He intentionally smothered a 14-year-old girl to death and burned her body to get rid of the evidence,' prosecutor Robert Walsh said during the trial according to the Daily Mail. 'He had a problem that needed solving, he didn't want to pay child support, and Shaniesha got in the way.'
Shaniesha's older sister, Shaquana Forbes, 22, described her anger against Ferdinand: "I don't think God should forgive him. He doesn't deserve forgiveness. I hope he rots in jail."
Smith also said she is struggling to forgive her granddaughter's killer.
"I feel very bad about it. I cry day and night. Yesterday, I was in tears. My little granddaughter. She was so quiet and loving. Oh God. Every day, every day I think about her," Smith told the Associated Press..
"I don't know because God don't love ugly and if you do bad things ... I don't know what to say about that. God forgive him but we still lose our daughter. I lose my granddaughter, my daughter lose her daughter so you see it's a big thing. We have to live with it forever. When he killed her, he killed the whole family," she said, sighing heavily. "Everybody is ailing because they can't believe it."
