Mom Sentenced in Deaths of 2 Girls Banished by Cult

Her daughters were kept in a car without food, water
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Oct 2, 2019 2:01 AM CDT
Doomsday Cult Member Gets Life for Deaths of 2 Daughters
This photo provided by the San Miguel County Sheriff's Office shows Ashford Nathaniel Archer.   (San Miguel County Sheriff's Office via AP,File)

A Colorado woman will spend the rest of her life behind bars for killing her two daughters after she and other members of a doomsday religious group banished them to a car without food or water because the girls were thought to have been impure. Nashika Bramble was sentenced to life in prison without parole Tuesday in the deaths of Makayla Roberts, 10, and Hannah Marshall, 8, the AP reports. She was convicted in July of two counts of first-degree murder. The sisters' bodies were found in Sept. 2017 in a car parked on a farm near Norwood, a town of about 500 people 30 miles west of the Telluride ski resort. Heat, dehydration, and starvation killed the girls, and they had been dead for several weeks before their bodies were found, authorities said.

Bramble was a member of a religious group that moved to the property earlier that year, court documents say. Investigator believe the group's spiritual leader, Madani Ceus of Haiti, declared that the two girls were possessed by unclean spirits during a past life and ordered them kept in a car without food or water for days as the others waited for the apocalypse before the 2017 solar eclipse. Ceus has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse. She is set to go to trial in January. The farm's owner, Frederick "Alec" Blair, pleaded guilty in May 2018 to one count of being an accessory to a crime and faces up to 12 years in prison. Another group member, Ashford Archer, was convicted in March of two counts of fatal child abuse and one count of being an accessory to a crime. He was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

(More Colorado stories.)

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