On September 2, 2003, at Clinton Lake in DeWitt County, Illinois, a car containing Amanda Hamm's three children rolled off a boat ramp into the water. Christopher Hamm, six, Austin Brown, three, and Kyleigh Hamm, one, all drowned. Hamm, then twenty-four, and her boyfriend Maurice LaGrone Jr were in the vehicle or at the ramp and got out.
Both were charged with first degree murder. The prosecution's case was that the drowning was deliberate. The defence was that the car had rolled in accidentally and that neither of them had been able to get the children out.
The two were tried separately. LaGrone was convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Hamm was acquitted of the murder charges and convicted of three counts of child endangerment resulting in death, and sentenced to ten years.
That split verdict is the case. Two juries heard substantially the same events and reached different conclusions about the two adults present, and the woman whose children they were stands acquitted of killing them.
She was released after serving part of the sentence. This entry records the acquittal as the operative finding on the murders, which this roster's status field does, correctly, also do.