California couple gets life without parole in torture, death of woman’s daughter

A Hawthorne couple convicted of murder and torture in the killing of the woman’s 7-year-old daughter in 2021 were sentenced Friday, Sept. 12, to life in prison without the possibility of parole, authorities said.

Ida Helen Brockman, 34, and Malachi Xavier Whalen, 33, were convicted by an Airport Superior Court jury in July following a 10-week trial, prosecutors said.

They were arrested in September 2021 after taking Brockman’s daughter, A’Miya Dawson, to the emergency room of a Willowbrook hospital after she became unresponsive, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. At the hospital, doctors determined that the girl’s injuries did not line up with statements made by Brockman and Whalen.

Detectives also searched the couple’s apartment and found additional evidence, sheriff’s officials said.

A’Miya “endured physical torture encompassing 58 individual injuries, including severe burns, blunt force trauma, multiple fractured ribs, a collapsed lung and other significant internal injuries,” the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement following the couple’s conviction.

A’Miya, whose name was spelled “Amaiya” by the Medical Examiner’s Office, died of acute respiratory failure and aspiration pneumonitis – a lung injury caused by inhaling foreign substances – with blunt force trauma listed as a significant condition, according to the Medical Examiner’s report.

Brockman also admitted to detectives that the couple had planned to try to frame A’Miya’s biological father for her death, prosecutors said.

DA Nathan Hochman said in a statement that the “brutal murder” of “a defenseless 7-year-old girl, at the hands of her own mother and her mother’s boyfriend is nothing short of horrific.”