As it is, the elder Sargent himself may never again plant eyes on the Friendly Confines, given what likely the next several decades hold in store for him from the decidedly not-so-friendly confines of his prison cell. On Wednesday, Peoria County Judge James Shadid didn't buy Sargent's poor-overwhelmed-me pleas, ruling in the latter's bench trial that he was not just criminally clueless as a parent but a murderer in the first degree, callously indifferent and self-absorbed to such an extreme that his conduct was not merely reckless but intentional, "brutal and heinous ... indicative of wanton cruelty."
In short, intolerable.
As such Sargent could be sentenced to a century behind bars when he comes back before Shadid in June. Whatever he gets, he'll serve 100 percent of it, minus time he's already spent behind bars. Sargent's one-time girlfriend and Ben's biological mother, Tracy Hermann, is scheduled to stand trial on the same charges in August.
Sargent's defense attorney had argued diminished capacity and sought the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter but Shadid wasn't buying it after three days of gruesome testimony and photos. "A picture paints a thousand words," Shadid would say in passing judgment.
Indeed, if at Christmas 2007 the almost four-month old Benjamin appeared in family photos with chubby cheeks and a smile, six weeks later his body was emaciated and raw. Ultimately he died not of starvation, as originally thought, but from infection - sepsis, specifically, as the waste he was left to sit in for days ate away at his skin until the toxins seeped into his bloodstream. Police would find him with open eyes and clenched fists on Feb. 12, still in the car seat his paternal grandmother had left him in when she dropped him off on Feb. 4.
In 25 years at this newspaper, we cannot recall a more horrific case of neglect. There is no way to dance around that delicately.