Lionel Tate, the teenager who got a second chance after he beat and stomped a 6-year-old girl to death, was sent back to prison for 30 years Thursday for gun possession. You do not get any more," Circuit Judge Joel T. Lazarus told Tate, who smirked as he was led off to jail in shackles. Tate, now 19, was convicted of beating Tiffany Eunick to death in , when he was 12, claiming he accidentally killed the girl while imitating pro wrestling moves he had seen on television.
He became the youngest person in modern U. His murder conviction was overturned in by an appeals court that said it was not clear Tate understood the charges. So full of life. He told Gillen that while his mother, who was baby sitting Tiffany, was in an upstairs bedroom, he was mimicking what he loved to watch on TV… wrestling. Tragically, Tiffany, a waif of a pound little girl, was fatally injured and the world was stunned. We were playing and I guess I was rough and she passed away. My heart again begins to tear.
I cry so hard it makes my headache. Questioning God why my child he had to take. Her other injuries included a fractured skull, fractured rib and swollen brain. These injuries were characterized by the prosecution as "similar to those she would have sustained by falling from a three-story building.
In sentencing Tate to life imprisonment, Judge Joel T. The sentence and the controversy. The sentence was controversial because Tate was 12 years old at the time and his victim was 6. He had been the youngest child in modern history to be sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States, bringing broad criticism on the treatment of juvenile offenders in the justice system of the State of Florida.
Tate's mother, a Florida State highway patrol trooper, had turned down a plea bargain arrangement which would have allowed Tate to serve a three-year term for second-degree murder and insisted on going to trial on hopes of an acquittal.
After the conviction, the prosecution openly joined Tate's plea for leniency in sentencing, and even offered to help in his appeal.
The trial judge criticized the prosecution for compromising the integrity of the adversarial system, and said that if the prosecution felt that life imprisonment were not warranted, they should not have overcharged him with murder in the first place. In January , a state appeals court overturned his conviction on the basis that his mental competency had not been evaluated before trial. This opened the way for Tate to accept the same plea deal he originally turned down, and he was released on one year's house arrest and 10 years' probation.
On September 3, , Tate was arrested for violating the terms of his plea bargain when he was found out of his house and carrying a four-inch knife. On October 29, the Associated Press reported that Tate was placed on zero tolerance probation, for an additional five years. The family he had been staying with asked he be removed because frequent visits by state probation officers were too stressful. Armed robbery arrest and subsequent plea bargain.
On May 23, , Tate was charged with armed burglary with battery, armed robbery and violation of probation, the Broward County, Florida, Sheriff's Office said. Tate greeted Domino's Pizza deliveryman Walter Ernest Gallardo with a handgun outside a friend's apartment after phoning in an order. Gallardo dropped the four pizzas and fled the scene. Tate then re-entered the apartment, assaulting the occupant who did not want Tate inside. Gallardo called upon reaching the Domino's store and returned to identify Tate, the sheriff's office said in a statement.
No gun was recovered. On March 1, , Tate accepted a plea bargain and will be sentenced to years imprisonment in a sentencing hearing in April Tate has refused to answer questions about where he got and later disposed of the gun. He was allowed to withdraw his guilty plea for robbery but sentenced to 30 years in prison on May 18, on the gun possession charge. That sentence was upheld October 24, On February 19, , Tate plead no contest to the pizza robbery and was sentenced to 10 years.
The sentence will run concurrently with his 30 year sentence for violating his probation. Lionel, who weighed pounds at the time, demonstrated some pro-wrestling techniques with 6-year-old, forty-eight pound Tiffany Eunick, with the result that she was punched, thrown, kicked and stomped to death.
On the coroner's report, the cause of Tiffany's death is listed as "blunt force trauma. Her skull was fractured in several places and her ribs were cracked. Part of her brain was flattened inside her head. The beating Lionel Tate gave her was so severe, part of Tiffany's liver broke loose and was floating free inside her body. The thought of being one of Tiffany's parents and having to make that identification at the morgue -- looking down at the brokenness, the dried blood, the horrible bruising on her arms, face and torso and knowing that the lifeless shell lying there on the gurney was your daughter, your baby -- is one that could make any parent's blood turn to ice.
Every natural urge that a parent has to shelter, protect and defend would suffer from an impotent, inconsolable grief. Lionel's mother, Florida state trooper Kathleen Grossett-Tate, claims that her son was just "playing" with Tiffany and that her death was the result of a "tragic accident.
Grossett-Tate has refused repeated requests for an interview. He was arrested in September when police found him outside at 2 a. Police later found that her three handguns were taken from a closet in her room. Only two have been recovered; none has been conclusively linked to the pizza robbery. The friend later told police that Tate, armed with a revolver, hid behind the door when delivery man Walter Gallardo arrived with the order. When Gallardo spotted the gun, he dropped the pizzas and ran, and called police.
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