David Sumney, the Pennsylvania man who brutally murdered his mother and took selfies with her body, has been sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison thanks to a controversial plea deal that virtually everyone in their family was vocally against.
By virtue of being jailed since 2019, he could get out in as few as 17 years.
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Sumney, 33, received the sentence on a single third-degree murder charge in connection with the savage 2019 slaying of his 67-year-old mother Margaret. According to a criminal complaint against Sumney, he tortured and murdered his mother before shoving her body in a bathroom sometime before Sept. 1 that year. Sumney also documented the whole harrowing scene, taking 277 photos that included several selfies with blood on his face and his mom’s body.
Despite the twisted allegations against him, Sumney was able to secure a plea deal in August that dismissed some of the most heinous charges, including first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse.
“I cannot believe I would let myself get in such a state where I could do something so bad, so horrible. I cannot believe what I did, that I killed my own mother,” Sumney, wearing a red prison jumpsuit while his hands were handcuffed in front of him by a prisoner belt, told the judge during the Thursday hearing on the fifth floor of Allegheny County County Court. “I cannot stop thinking about it. I think about it every day. I’m sorry, but sorry doesn’t cut it. I handled things as badly as a person could have.”
“To my family, to my sisters, and my aunts, I know it’s impossible to forgive me. I don’t forgive myself. I just want to let them know I am truly sorry,” he added.
Both the district attorney and Sumney’s lawyers presented witnesses to the court to bolster their arguments for harsher (though not nearly as harsh as the family wished) and more modest sentences, respectively. Prosecutors called several of Margaret’s family members to speak, including two of her sisters and her niece, Margo.
Margaret’s older sister, Mary Ellen, stared at Sumney as she called him “less than a piece of trash” and said that she wished he “receive the death penalty.” Ann Shade, their other sister, also begged the court “to not give him a second chance.”
“I had no idea you were this kind of monster.”
— David Sumney’s sister.
If convicted of the original charges, Sumney would have faced life behind bars.
Sumney’s cousin, Margo, recalled how she was one of the first people to enter her aunt’s blood-soaked home in 2019—saying she will never forget the “metallic smell” when she walked in.
“He is the epitome of pure evil,” she said in court. “We will never find peace with any of this.”