Queens voodoo mom Marie Lauradin sentenced to 17 years in prison for setting daughter on fire

The New York Daily News/June 7, 2011

The Queens voodoo mom who set her six-year-old daughter ablaze in a grisly, demon-casting ritual was sentenced to 17 years in prison Monday.

Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard Buchter scolded Marie Lauradin for lying to cops and probation officers about how her daughter, Frantzcia Saintil, was set on fire, leaving her with life-altering scars over 25 percent of her body.

After her February 2009 arrest, Lauradin told cops she accidentally spilled a pot of boiling water on the child when the youngster came up from behind her. And she recently told probation officers she was rubbing alcohol on the child to soothe a fever when a candle ignited it.

"Either you tell me the truth or we'll try the case," Buchter told Lauradin.

Lauradin, 31, left the courtroom briefly to talk with her lawyer.

When she returned she admitted -under questioning from Buchter stripping the child naked and pouring an accelerant over her head and in a circle on the floor - a voodoo rite known as "loa."

She set the girl on fire and failed to get her medical attention for another 24 hours, prosecutors say.

"The only demonic presence this child had to worry about was her mother," Bucther said. "It's sickening to think of a mother committing such an unspeakable act of savagery."

The child has cheloid scars on her face that her classmates tease her about, said Assistant District Attorney Leigh Bishop.

Her foster mother told prosecutors the child has been acting angrily toward other children as she adjusts to her disfigurement and life without her mother.

"She will go through life knowing that her own mother disfigured her," Bishop told Buchter. "This was a monstrous act of depravity."

After the attack, Frantzcia was placed in a medically-induced coma so doctors could treat the second- and third-degree burns that caused skin to peel off her torso, legs and face.

Lauradin's mother, Sylvenie Thessier, 72, was recently sentenced to up to three years in prison on a reckless endangerment for failing to get her granddaughter medical attention.

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