DOYLESTOWN, Pennsylvania: A woman who plotted the rape, torture and murder of her own teenage daughter pleaded guilty on Friday and was sentenced to life in prison for a crime so barbaric that prosecutors and the judge strained for superlatives to describe it.
One day after her co-conspirator boyfriend was sentenced to death, Sara Packer, 44, appeared in a suburban Philadelphia courthouse and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, kidnapping, abuse of a corpse and 16 other offenses in the 2016 slaying of 14-year-old Grace Packer.
“Evil attracts evil. Evil recognizes evil. And in Jacob Sullivan, you found one of your own,” Bucks County Judge Diane Gibbons, her voice dripping with contempt, told Packer in sentencing her to the maximum term.
“You like rape. You like murder. That’s a fact,” said Gibbons, decrying the “rot” and “warped depravity” on display in the case.
Packer, whose crimes were not eligible for Pennsylvania’s death penalty, did not make a statement.
Prosecutors said Packer and her boyfriend, Jacob Sullivan, shared a rape-murder fantasy and spent months plotting Grace’s slaying in a vacant house about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Philadelphia.
Sara Packer testified that the couple took her adoptive daughter to a sweltering attic and gave her what they intended to be a lethal overdose of medicine. Sullivan sexually assaulted her as Sara Packer watched. They bound her hands and feet with zip ties, stuffed a ball gag in her mouth and left her to die.
Grace eventually managed to escape some of her bindings. But she was unable to make it out of the house before Sullivan and Sara Packer returned overnight — some 12 hours later — and Sullivan strangled her while Sara Packer held her hand and watched her die.
Sara Packer and Sullivan stored Grace’s body in cat litter for months, then dismembered it and dumped the remains in a remote, wooded area of northeastern Pennsylvania where hunters found it in October 2016.
Bucks County prosecutor Jennifer Schorn said in court Friday that Sara Packer — a former county adoptions supervisor who had fostered dozens of children over the years — saw Grace Packer as a source of government benefits and nothing more.
Schorn and the judge marveled at how someone who professed to be a mother could have been so cruel.
“It defies nature, what she did,” Schorn said.
Sullivan, who pleaded guilty to first degree murder, was sentenced to death by a jury Thursday. Packer admitted in court during Sullivan’s sentencing hearing that she hated Grace and “wanted her to go away.”
Sara Packer lost her job at Northampton County’s children and youth department in 2010 after her husband at the time, David Packer, was sent to prison for sexually assaulting Grace and another foster child. But child welfare authorities did not remove Grace from the home, despite evidence of abuse.
The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services launched an investigation after Grace’s murder. Its report was sealed while Packer and Sullivan were being prosecuted, but is expected to be made public on Monday.
After the sentencing, District Attorney Matt Weintraub called on lawmakers to pass a child protection law called “Grace’s Law.”
“Grace’s memory will no longer be bound to that of these two predators. She is free,” Weintraub said.
‘Evil attracts evil’: Judge gives mom life in teen murder
‘Evil attracts evil’: Judge gives mom life in teen murder
- Sara Packer and Sullivan stored Grace’s body in cat litter for months, then dismembered it and dumped the remains in a remote, wooded area of northeastern Pennsylvania
- Sullivan, who pleaded guilty to first degree murder, was sentenced to death by a jury Thursday
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
