Pittsburgh woman convicted, sentenced in baby kidnapping
A Pittsburgh woman was convicted and immediately sentenced to 6 to 12 years behind bars for kidnapping in Fayette County Court on Thursday.
A jury found Yvonne Bradley, 46, guilty of kidnapping, interfering with the custody of a child and endangering the welfare of a child. She was acquitted of unlawful restraint.
Additionally, since kidnapping is listed as a Tier III offense under the Adam Walsh Act, Bradley will be required to register her whereabouts quarterly for the rest of her life.
Bradley put her head down on the counsel table and wept as the verdict was read.
Prior to sentencing, Bradley told President Judge John F. Wagner Jr., “There are a lot of people that know me and would know it was never my intention to hurt anybody.”
Wagner asked Bradley if she needed additional time to find people to speak on her behalf, and she replied, “I could name a thousand people.”
“I just didn’t think this would go this way,” Bradley said.
After the prosecution rested its case, defense attorney Brian Salisbury conferred with Bradley and determined she would not testify on her own behalf.
In his closing argument, Salisbury asked the jury to consider whether Bradley’s actions were the actions of a kidnapper, pointing out that she was not wearing a disguise when police found her and Jeannine Smith’s infant a few blocks away from the hotel where they spent the night, and that she had no means of transportation out of town.
Salisbury noted that Bradley sold the SUV she drove in with Smith and the baby from Pittsburgh to Uniontown once they got to Uniontown, leaving her no “getaway car.”
“Who does that?” Salisbury said. “It’s absolutely absurd to think that on July 9, Miss Bradley was planning to take a child.”
Salisbury reminded jurors that Smith testified she left her baby in Bradley’s care while she went to nearby Walgreen’s the morning the baby disappeared. He argued that the fact that Bradley was found by Uniontown police within blocks of the hotel showed she intended to return the baby.
“If 15 more minutes had passed,” Salusbury said, “I bet we wouldn’t even be here.”
Assistant District Attorney Michelle Kelley, in her closing argument, called into question the notion that Bradley was taking the baby for a walk because he was fussy.
“Why not pick up the cellphone and call the mother?” Kelley.
Kelley contended that while Smith asked Bradley to watch over her sleeping infant, Smith did not give her permission to leave the hotel with the child.
From the time Bradley first approached Smith in Pittsburgh using a Jamaican accent and peddling a fake story about scouting for talent for a diaper commercial to the time Bradley was interviewed by police, Kelley said the defendant was dishonest.
“There is not a ripple of credibility in that ocean of lies,” Kelley told the jury.
Kelley argued that Bradley’s claim that she was planning to bring the infant back was one of those lies, based on the fact that police found incriminating documents in the hotel room and on flash drives found in Bradley’s purse.
Kelley told the jury that the adoption papers found in the hotel room with Smith’s forged signature included information about the potential adoptive family, whose last name was Jennings. The flash drives from Bradley’s purse contained what Kelley argued were bogus ultrasound photos of a baby that Bradley claimed she was pregnant with. Also found in Bradley’s purse was a phone number for a tax company, several thousand dollars from the sale of a vehicle Bradley illegally acquired, and the address for the Jennings family in Suffolk County, Va.
In February, Bradley was convicted of theft by deception, receiving stolen property, forgery and tampering with records, in the case of the fraudulently-obtained SUV. Her 21 month to five year sentence in that case will be served consecutively with the sentence from the kidnapping case.
Asked what her thoughts were on the kidnapping verdict, Bradley tearfully said, “They’re wrong.”