A mother who believed playing a computer game was more important than feeding her child has spoken out.
It may have happened nine years ago, but three-year-old Brandi Wulf’s death is still as gobsmacking as ever.
Her mother, Rebecca Christie was so consumed by her online addiction that she let the toddler progressively starve to death. She’s now serving 25 years in prison.
Rebecca played the game World of Warcraft for 15 hours the day Brandi died “” from noon to 3am”” the computer showed “continuous activity” as she chatted with friends from the online fantasy role-playing game, according to court documents.
She became so consumed she forgot to feed her child, give her a drink of water, attend to her cries.
It’s still gobsmacking. It’s still unbelievable.
“It was more important than anything,” Rebecca told 60 Minutes on Sunday night, speaking from inside a Florida prison, in the US.
“It was one of the things that kept me sane. It became much better than home.”
Rebecca was sentenced in federal court for her November 2009 conviction on second-degree murder and child abandonment charges.
Prosecutors said Brandi gained just .5kg in the last year of her life and weighed 10 kilograms when Christie called 911 on Jan. 26, 2006, to report her daughter was limp and unconscious.
Christie’s ex-husband, U.S. Air Force Sgt. Derek Wulf told an FBI agent he would regularly come home from work and find his daughter with an empty water glass as his wife was busy “playing on the computer”.
The house had an overflowing litter box and pervasive smell of cat urine. And there appeared to be so little food that the child ate cat food, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. There also was no PediaSure, police said, which a year prior had been prescribed to the child for digestive problems and frequent diarrhea.
At a sentencing hearing in mid-May before U.S. District Judge Robert Brack, Christie sobbed that she was sorry.
“I’ll never get to see her grown up. … That weighs on my heart. That was my little girl,” Christie said slowly, with difficulty, her shoulders hunched and the chains on her wrists shaking. “It was my responsibility to take care of her, and I failed her, and I’m sorry.”
Feature image credit 9jumpin.com
