A California man has been convicted of murdering his daughter after he was unable to have her aborted.
A jury today agreed that Cameron John Brown hurled the girl off a cliff to get revenge against his ex-girlfriend, who refused to have an abortion, and to avoid the possibility of costly child support payments.
“He didn’t want her to be born…he wanted nothing to do with being a father,” Deputy District Attorney Craig Hum said in his closing argument.
Hum told jurors that the 53-year-old pressured the child's mother, Sarah Key-Marer, to have an abortion. When she refused, he tried to have her deported.
He froze the baby out of his life, the prosecutor said. Finally, he sought joint custody of the child to avoid paying $1,000 in child support.
But on November 8, 2000, he took his four-year-old daughter, Lauren Sarene Key, to the top of Inspiration Point in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, and hurled her off the 120-foot precipice. Then he spoke leisurely with the 911 operator for more than five minutes as his daughter bobbed in the water below. He sounded entirely unconcerned about his daughter's well-being on the phone.
“The primary reason for killing Lauren…was to get back at Sarah, for revenge,” Hum said, according to a report in MyNewsLA.com.
Brown was so plainly guilty that even his attorney, Aron Laub, suggested he be convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter, instead of murder. Thankfully, the jury convicted him of the weightier charge, and on June 19 he will find out if he will spend the rest of his life in prison without parole.
Raised in a culture of sexual excess, Brown wanted to be able to satisfy his lust without emotional or financial consequences. He wanted to avoid fatherhood one way or another. Abortion was one route to that end; murder nearly five years later was another.
Mission accomplished.
But of course, had Kay-Marer acceded to his wishes when the child was not yet born, there would be no trial, no crime, no outrage. Cecile Richards and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz would have said that the couple had carefully weighed all their options and made a decision that is properly left to the mother “in consultation with her conscience, and her God, and her doctor.” (And her homicidal beau.)
This case starkly illustrates an inescapable reality: The availability of abortion degrades life at every stage, inside or outside the womb, and puts us on the slippery slope to infanticide. If it is legal to abort a child at any point, including five minutes before a doctor was scheduled to induce labor, what is wrong with killing a child five minutes after she is born, as Kermit Gosnell did? Or days later in a “postnatal abortion,” as certain medical “ethicists” have suggested? The same disregard for life that fueled Cameron Brown's insistence that his girlfriend have an abortion fueled his decision to kill his daughter with his bare hands.
Abortion is just child murder at another date – and vice-versa.
