Mother Accidentally Kills Daughter While Aiming At Stray Dog, Faces 8 Years In Prison

A woman from Oklahomais now facing eight years in federal prison after mistakenly causing the death of her teenage daughter. 43-year-old Amanda Myrene Fields Moffett, shot and killed her 16-year-old daughter in October 2018 while aiming for a stray dog near their property.

She has now accepted a guilty plea to one count of involuntary manslaughter after prosecutors rekindled the case last month. Moffett was initially charged with first-degree murder at the time of the incident, but it was subsequently dismissed.

Tragedy struck on October 5, 2018, when Moffett stepped out on the porch of her home in Nowata, Oklahoma, to shoot at a stray dog that had been attacking kittens near their property.

It appears that the 43-year-old had had enough of the dog coming around to be a menace and wanted to end it all. 

However, on that day, her daughter Laramie was outside trying to save the kitten when Moffett's handgun was discharged. This was done without her verifying the whereabouts of the 16-year-old on the property.

"I went out onto my front porch and discharged a handgun at what I believed was the stray dog," Moffett admitted in her federal plea agreement to charges of involuntary manslaughter, per Daily Mail.

She added, "When I discharged the firearm, it was dark outside, and I knew [my daughter] was outside of my home trying to save the kittens from the dog. I did not verify that [my daughter] was not in my line of fire when I discharged the handgun."

Elsewhere in the plea agreement, the defendant admitted that the tragic incident was caused by her being "grossly negligent," and her actions could be seen as the "direct and proximate cause" of her daughter's death.

Her words were echoed in the statement released by Clinton Johnson from the U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Oklahoma.

"Every gun owner has the legal responsibility to use extreme caution when discharging a firearm," he said to the press. "This case unfortunately highlights the potential tragic results absent that caution."

The investigation into the case was conducted by a joint task force between the FBI, the Nowata County Sheriff's Office, and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Aaron Jolly and Valeria Luster were the prosecutors assigned to the case.

Following the guilty plea, Moffett's lawyer is yet to make a public statement.

It took this amount of time to reach a decision regarding the incident because the initial first-degree murder charge, which had been filed against the Cherokee citizen, was dismissed.

At the time, the case was deemed to be unlawfully filed for multiple reasons, after which federal prosecutors paused pushing on with the case. However, it was then rekindled during the middle of last month.

With Moffett now accepting a guilty plea, which implies there would be no prolonged court case, she now faces up to eight years in federal prison.

However, she might not get the book thrown at her, as it is believed that pleading guilty alongside other factors will likely influence the judge assigned to her case to place her sentence between zero and 16 months.

In the meantime, Mofett's sentencing date is yet to be scheduled but might be fixed in the coming months. She is currently under supervised release, and as per the terms of her plea agreement, she has to forfeit any ammunition and guns in her home to the authorities.