Gina Emmanuel appearing in court during her April 2025 murder trial in Miami, Florida (WTVJ).
A 56-year-old former registered nurse and adoptive mother in Florida has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of her adoptive 7-year-old daughter. The woman severely beat, starved, and tortured the child, and nearly subjected her other adopted children to the same fate.
On Wednesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cristina Miranda sentenced Gina Emmanuel to life in prison without parole for the brutal killing of Samayah Emmanuel in 2018, as reported by Law&Crime.
Earlier this month, a Miami jury found Emmanuel guilty of first-degree premeditated murder for Samayah’s death. She was also convicted on two counts of aggravated child abuse due to her cruel treatment of Samayah’s siblings, who were 5 and 12 years old at that time.
Thursday’s sentencing hearing was attended by several of the victims’ family members, including Emmanuel’s oldest adopted daughter, Ayanna Gordon, who is now 18 years old. Gordon spoke during the hearing, addressing Emmanuel directly.
“Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. I’m letting God take this wheel. With that now said, I wish you well in hell,” she said, apparently quoting rapper Cardi B, according to a report from Miami CBS affiliate WFOR.
As Law&Crime previously reported, the atrocities Emmanuel inflicted upon her children included forcing them to eat human feces, intentionally burning them on the stove, chaining them to chairs, physically abusing them, and withholding food and water, among other forms of torture.
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Gordon also provided critical testimony against her mother during the trial, speaking about the horrors she and her sisters endured at the hands of their mother during the three-day trial, Miami NBC affiliate WTVJ reported.
“She would chain us, she would have us lay down, she would chain us and lock us until she got back,” the daughter reportedly told jurors.
During the trial, prosecutors said that Emmanuel, who fostered the children before adopting them, was fixated on being in control of every aspect of her daughters’ lives and enforced her rules through heinous abuse, Miami ABC affiliate WPLG reported.
“You will learn through this trial about the defendant’s control,” prosecutors reportedly said during opening statements. “You’ll hear she kept her refrigerator chained. These three girls were forced to urinate and defecate in a bucket. They were malnourished, whipped and didn’t see a pediatrician. What else was going to happen as a result of the choices she made?”
Emmanuel’s defense attorney reportedly claimed that the registered nurse engaged in “reasonable corporal punishment” that did not amount to child abuse, asserting that Samaya’s death was mostly attributable to untreated diabetes.
“Should she have taken the child to the hospital? Yes, absolutely, but it wasn’t murder. It was not child abuse,” her attorney reportedly told jurors.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle lauded the result after jurors convicted Emmanuel for her daughter’s murder.
“The guilty verdict in Gina Emmanuel’s first-degree murder and child abuse trial brought to the light of day the horrors 7-year-old Samaya so tragically suffered before her death,”Rundle said in a statement after jurors found Emmanuel guilty. “No one could ever imagine that a trained nurse would beat, torture, and starve Samaya and her two adopted sisters as a means of instilling the defendant’s vision of discipline. The jury fully understood that she ultimately ignored the suffering of young Samaya which led to this child’s death.”
