A woman who pleaded guilty to killing her boyfriend and burning his body was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
A judge sentenced Dawn McIntosh on Wednesday for the August 2015 killing of Shron McWhorter, the New York Daily News reported.
McIntosh killed McWhorter, who was 43 and her boyfriend at the time, in a car in Astoria, Queens, following an argument where she accused him of infidelity. She shot him in the car after they had sex and then called relatives to help her dispose of his body, the newspaper reported.
After McWhorter's body was found, detectives began to interview people he knew as part of their routine investigation, including Mcintosh. Mcintosh told police she hadn't seen him that day, they had been supposed to meet but he stood her up, authorities say she told detectives.
While detectives were talking to Mcintosh, they noticed she was missing a fingernail, the NYPD previously said. Mcintosh was taken into custody for additional questioning, and admitted to killing her boyfriend, according to police. Mcintosh told police she shot McWhorter twice in the torso, then got her son to try to help her move the body into a friend's car.
McWhorter was too heavy for McIntosh and her son, according to investigators, so they allegedly moved the body a bit and then lit it on fire. McIntosh told police she doused her boyfriend in lighter fluid and lit him aflame using a cigarette lighter.
The sentencing hearing at the Queens Supreme Court was the first to take place in-person since courts closed in March due to the coronavirus pandemic. Four members of McWhorter’s family attended.
McWhorter’s son, Donte, wrote a letter that was read aloud in court. He was 16 when his father died and was the person who identified the body, which was badly burned.
“You have not only taken my father’s life,” Donte wrote. “You have taken my life as well,” pointing out the many events of his life that his father has missed since dying, the newspaper reported.
McWhorter’s mother, Barbara, said she had been living in hell since her son’s death.
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“The suffering that you caused my son to shoot him twice, not once, but twice, and then you wanna burn him? And you want me to forgive you? That’s asking too much,” the newspaper reported Barbara McWhorter said in court.
McIntosh called herself a broken woman, saying, “If I’d reached out for help maybe it would have been something different, but I didn’t and I made a horrible mistake.”
