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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah judge ordered a Vernal woman Friday to serve at least 25 years and up to life in the Utah State Prison for smothering her 3-year-old stepdaughter in 2019.
Both sides had agreed to a recommended sentence of life without parole, but 8th District Judge Edwin Peterson said he wanted to allow investigators to determine in 25 years whether Mckenley Yadon still poses a risk to anyone — especially children — or if she could safely be released.
"It's one of the most reprehensible and and despicable crimes known to mankind," Peterson said. However, he added, "I think we're dealing with a condition of sickness here in the way somebody would think like that."
Yadon, 25, pleaded guilty in August to aggravated murder, a first-degree felony, as part of a plea bargain that spared her a possible death sentence for the killing of the young Arianna Stout.
"Little Arianna's life was snuffed out in the most hateful and violent way," Uintah County Attorney Greg Lamb said Friday in a hearing held over videoconference.
On March 14, 2019, police responded to Yadon's home in Vernal to find the child unresponsive, with bruises around her ear, court documents say. The girl, who was approaching her 4th birthday, was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a hospital.
Lamb said Yadon later told police she smothered the girl using a blanket, demonstrating how she did so. Fellow inmates in jail reported that Yadon expressed being jealous of the child and blaming Arianna for her death.
The girl's father, Aaron Stout, cried Friday as he recalled how Arianna ran home to greet him when he returned from work at an oil field, sometimes putting on his hard hat and saying, "Let's go to work!"
The girl's family has recalled her as a protector for her older sister, who has autism. They have said Arianna was also elated to meet the organ recipient who received her biological mother's heart after the woman died in 2017.
"I'm just so distraught that someone could be so heartless to take it out on an innocent child," Stout said. "I'm trying to move on with my life, but how can you do that when you're so broken?"
Yadon declined to speak before she was sentenced, saying, "No, your honor," in a voice thick with emotion.
Defense attorney Rudy Bautista told the Deseret News after the hearing that his client has several mental illnesses and developmental delays. He said Yadon's biological parents essentially abandoned her as a child and she long endured physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
Bautista said the judge's decision to grant Yadon the chance to leave prison in 2045 was compassionate and a recognition that the medical world could someday help Yadon and others like her.
As part of the plea agreement and in exchange for her guilty plea, a remaining charge of child abuse, a second-degree felony, was dismissed.
