Mitchelle Blair, also known as “Freezer Mom,” is behind bars for murdering her two children, Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry, and hiding their bodies inside a deep freezer at her home in Detroit, Michigan.
On the morning of March 24, 2015, a bailiff from the 36th District Court was sent to Mitchelle’s apartment at the Martin Luther King Apartments to serve an eviction notice, but the then-35-year-old wasn’t there, according to MLive.
A moving crew arrived a short while later and entered the untidy apartment, where they found the frozen body of a female child in the deep freezer, which was located in the living room area.
The girl was wrapped in a plastic bag, and just beneath her body was the frozen body of another child—a boy.
Authorities said they were able to identify the remains as those of 13-year-old Stoni and her half-brother, Stephen, 9, three days after they were thawed naturally at a local morgue.
An autopsy revealed that they died from blunt-force trauma.
The exact time of their deaths could not be determined, but according to Mitchelle’s surviving teen daughter, Stoni died on Aug. 30, 2012, and Stephen died on May 25, 2013.
Police located their mother at a house nearby. Upon questioning, Mitchelle was arrested on multiple counts of child abuse.
Three months after her arrest, Mitchelle confessed to murdering her children, whom she referred to as “demons.”
According to her statement, she returned home one day in August 2012 and found her eldest daughter waiting for her at the door. She was eager to show her what her youngest son, who was six at the time, was doing with his toys.
When Mitchelle saw that he was making his action figures hump each other, she asked if anyone had ever done that to him.
The boy initially said no, but moments later, he said yes.
At night, he asserted that Stephen would sexually assault him in his bed, and sometimes he wasn’t able to breathe because his face would be pushed into the mattress.
From that moment on, Mitchelle said he didn’t hold back. She said he gave her a “very detailed account of what he [Stephen] did.”
The child went on to say that Stephen would urinate on him in the morning, and he would force him to drink Windex—a cleaning product she kept in the basement.
When Mitchelle confronted Stephen about the allegations, he allegedly admitted to them. That’s when she attacked him.
Mitchelle punched and kicked Stephen, and she placed a garbage bag over his head several times until he lost consciousness.
After regaining consciousness, she grabbed a belt and wrapped it around Stephen’s neck, and she lifted him while asking, “Do you like how this feels?” PEOPLE reported.
Stephen lost consciousness again.
She also threw scalding hot water on Stephen’s genital area multiple times until his skin came off, and she forced him to drink Windex.
Mitchelle said she told herself that she was going to stop beating her son “because I looked in the room, I’m like, he is tore up, you know.”
Stephen was vomiting, could not urinate, and had a faint heartbeat—he died that day. Mitchelle said she was going to call 911, but when her youngest son asked her not to, she put Stephen’s body in the deep freezer.
“I’m glad I did because if I had not have done that, I would not have found out about Stoni,” Mitchelle said. “Everything happened how it was meant to happen.”
Nine months after Stephen Berry’s death, Mitchelle said she found out that her daughter was also sexually assaulting her youngest son.
Mitchelle began starving her daughter, only feeding her oatmeal once a day. She would also punch, kick, and beat Stoni with a wooden stick.
She threw scalding hot water on Stoni while she was in the bathtub and strangled her with a t-shirt.
Afterward, she suffocated her to death with a grocery bag before storing her body inside the freezer, atop Stephen’s body, where they both remained for three years.
Mitchelle told the judge that she “had always told my kids, the worst thing you could ever do to somebody is rape them.”
“I always told my son that, and I always told the girls, the worst thing you could do is cry rape on somebody else if they didn’t rape them.”
“They fully knew what they were doing. I do not feel any remorse for what I did to Stoni because she had no remorse for what she did to my son. There was no other option. There’s no excuse for rape… I would kill them again.”
Mitchell said she does not claim Stoni and Stephen as her children.
“I have two children; that’s it,” she said.
Prosecutor Carin Goldfarb stated that there was no evidence to prove that Mitchelle’s youngest son was sexually assaulted.
“There was evidence that the surviving children were physically abused by this defendant [Mitchelle],” Goldfarb said.
In June 2015, Mitchelle pleaded guilty to first-degree premeditated murder.
She was sentenced to life at the Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan, without the possibility of parole.