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Tenia Campbell.
The Medford woman who smothered her twin toddlers and had intended to kill herself before being arrested by police in Montauk in 2019 pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in the first degree last week in a Riverside courtroom.
Tenia Campbell, 29, admitted in court last Wednesday, December 13, to having killed her daughters and will be sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for the murders, according to a deal struck by her attorney and Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney’s office. She is scheduled to be officially sentenced by Suffolk County Court Judge Richard Ambro on January 25.
“This is such a sad and tragic case,” Tierney said in a statement released following the guilty plea. “Those girls looked to their mother for protection and love. Instead, she executed them. [She] has one thing those twin girls will never have again: life. But now this defendant will get to live out the majority of her life behind bars.”
Campbell was brought into the courtroom for her guilty plea with a plastic “spit mask” covering a portion of her face, to prevent her from spitting at or biting court officers. Campbell has been charged with assault on at least two occasions while in jail stemming from disputes with Suffolk County Department of Correction officers — most recently on October 27, when she was charged with four counts of assaulting correction officers at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverside who were trying to restrain her during “a prolonged altercation,” according to court records.
Ambro told her during her plea hearing last week that he would allow her to plead guilty to a lesser charge related to that incident on January 25 and have her sentence for that crime run concurrently with that of the murder charges. But he warned that her sentence agreement for the murder charges — which would allow her to eventually apply for parole — is contingent on her good behavior going forward.
She affirmed her guilt in the murders of the two girls with only a simple “yes” answer to the series of questions about that day posed to her in court by Assistant District Attorney Francis Schroeder.
On June 27, 2019, Campbell, then 24, was found by East Hampton Town Police officers at the entrance to Third House in Montauk County Park just east of downtown Montauk, after her mother, Vanessa McQueen, had alerted police that she thought her daughter was suicidal.
Campbell begged the approaching officers to shoot her.
In the backseat of her Chrysler minivan nearby, the first officers on the scene found Campbell’s twin 2-year-old daughters, Jasmine and Jada, strapped into their car seats. Neither was breathing.
Officers administered CPR and police gave ambulances a high-speed escort to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, but both of the little girls were pronounced dead on arrival. Their mother would later tell police she had smothered them.
Campbell had a history of mental illness. She had been diagnosed as bipolar, her mother told investigators, and had been behaving erratically in the days leading up to the incident. Earlier on the day she was arrested Campbell had called her mother and told her that she was going to kill her daughters and herself.
“She kept saying she was sorry but she didn’t want to live anymore,” McQueen said in a statement to police investigators that day. “I was trying to calm her down, but she was yelling and crying and saying she couldn’t live anymore and that she was going to kill herself and her babies. She said, ‘They are already dead. I killed them with my bare hands.’”
McQueen had called 911 while still on the phone with her daughter and told police that she’d said she was in Montauk — having apparently driven there from western Suffolk with the children already dead. Police used Campbell’s cellphone signal to track her to Third House.
In custody, Campbell admitted to police that she killed her daughters. But in court she pleaded not guilty, and her attorney, John Halverson, sought to focus his defense on her history of mental health issues.
“The act speaks for itself,” he said following one of her early court appearances in 2019. “Any mother alleged to have harmed her children is not in the right state of mind.”
A New York-based forensic psychiatrist, Sasha Bardey, did extensive interviews with Campbell and her entire family, and wrote a report to the court that he believed Campbell was suffering from severe mental illness at the time of her daughters’ deaths. But another psychiatrist brought in by the D.A.’s office countered that assessment, saying that she was not suffering from such severe mental divergence as to legally excuse her actions.
Campbell has been in jail now for more than four years, which will be counted as part of her ultimate sentence and toward the countdown to her eligibility for parole. She has been shuffled repeatedly between the Suffolk County jails in Riverside and Yaphank, since the incident.
Following Wednesday’s proceedings, her attorney, John Halverson, said that his client has “come to grips” with what she had done and has been receiving mental health treatment in jail. He said he hopes that will continue once she enters the state prison system.
“There are no winners here,” Halverson said. “She has to live with her actions. She will be tortured for the rest of her life.”
