A South Carolina man who pleaded guilty to child abuse resulting in the death of his 3-year-old foster daughter was sentenced to 20 years in prison earlier this week.
Jerry Austin Robinson, 35, previously accepted legal culpability over the January 2021 death of Victoria Rose Smith. In April of this year, he pleaded guilty to homicide by child abuse/aiding and abetting.
Robinson has long maintained that he never personally abused the toddler but that he knew his wife, Ariel Robinson, 29, regularly beat her with belts and paddles and that he did nothing to stop the abuse.
“I told her she had gone too far this time, I should have stopped it,” the defendant told the court during his wife’s trial in May of this year, according to Spartanburg, S.C. CBS affiliate WSPA.
On Jan. 14 2021, Jerry Robinson called 911 roughly 15 minutes after 2:00 p.m. to report the worst. The long and short of that call was shared in court during his plea hearing by Assistant Solicitor Christy Sustakovitch, according to a report by Greenville News.
“We have an emergency, our daughter is unresponsive,” the prosecutor said, reciting the defendant’s words to 911 dispatchers. “She drank a lot of water. We tried to do CPR to get it out.”
In testimony against the wife, the husband claimed the wife would get upset at the girl if she ate too slowly or used the bathroom for too long.
On the day Victoria Robinson died, he said, Ariel Robinson abused the victim for roughly an hour before he came inside. There he told jurors that he found his wife standing over the child, saying: “You’re not done. You don’t get to tell me…