Inset: Lilyana Wagner (Tifton Judicial Circuit District Attorney). Background: News footage shows the Tifton, Georgia, home where Rachel Wagner was fatally shot by her daughter (WALB).
A Georgia teenager who acknowledged killing her mother in a written confession has been sentenced to life behind bars.
Lilyana Wagner, now 16, pleaded guilty to felony murder and aggravated assault in the November 2024 killing of her mother, 51-year-old Rachel Suzanne Wagner. Tifton Judicial Circuit District Attorney Patrick Warren said in a press release that Lilyana, who was 14 when she shot her mother in the head, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
According to Warren, the case began to unfold on Nov. 19, 2024, after Lilyana was involved in a car crash. At the scene, she told police that she lived alone with her mother. When investigators later learned Rachel Wagner had failed to report to work that morning and was not answering her phone, Tifton Police Department officers went to her home for a welfare check.
Rachel Wagner, originally from New Zealand, had lived in the United States for nearly three decades. Speaking shortly after the murder to the New Zealand news outlet Stuff, her sister-in-law, Kiri Te Paea, said Lilyana Wagner was heavily interested in video games, particularly “guns and shooting games.” The homeschooled teen, she said, spent “hours and hours gaming while Rachel was at work,” often rushing through schoolwork before returning to her games.
The post Mom found dead in her bed after 14-year-old homeschooled daughter decided to kill her instead of shooting up her former school first appeared on Law & Crime.
