[...]
The trial began with an opening statement from Prosecuting Attorney Christina Flanigan, who argued that on September 23, 2011, Lena Lunsford Conaway, 35, struck her three-year-old daughter, Aliayah, with a broken piece of a wooden bed board, after the child was crying.
Flanigan alleges that two of Lunsford Conaway‘s other daughters witnessed the strike, but were prevented from helping Aliayah.
One of the daughters, known as "DC," was nine years old at the time of the alleged incident. She testified Monday that Aliayah was struggling to get up, but her mother ordered the child to stay in a corner for hours. Later that night, the girls felt Aliayah’s head and said it was “squishy,” according to the daughter’s testimony.
The next morning, she said, Lunsford Conaway asked her two daughters to wake up Aliayah. After Aliayah showed no signs of responding, the girls went to retrieve their mother, who brought Aliayah’s body into the bathroom.
In her testimony, the now 15-year-old daughter said Lunsford-Conaway tried to resuscitate Aliayah. When that failed, she said, Lunsford-Conaway put Aliayah’s body and clothes in a hamper.
The daughter testified that Lunsford-Conaway took the hamper, and ordered her and her sister to get into the van. She alleged that they drove to a remote area in Vadis, where her mother got out of the car and took the hamper into the woods. When she returned, her daughter testified, Lunsford-Conaway urged the girls to promise to keep what happened as a secret and to pretend that they didn’t know where the girl was that morning.
That is—until October 2016, when Flanigan said the girls "couldn’t keep their mother’s secret any longer." Lunsford-Conaway was arrested in connection to Aliayah’s death the next month.
[...]
http://www.wdtv.com/content/news/Le...-delay-with-opening-statements-479887793.html