Gina Emmanuel: Woman convicted for child abuse and murder of 7-year-old adopted daughter
Surviving daughter describes in court the horrific abuse Gina put them through; explains that her little sister was sick and not taken to a doctor, dying at home.
Nov. 3, 2018 would be the worst nightmare for a child caretaker in Miami-Dade, Florida when she found 7-year-old Samaya unresponsive in the family’s apartment. The caretaker called the mother of the three kids she was watching, but Gina Emmanuel didn’t show for hours.
“She was lying down but it was like she was having a seizure,” the caretaker testified later.
Samaya had been suffering from a cold for a few days that prosecutors said progressed into pneumonia and sepsis, for which Gina failed to take her to a doctor. The young girl died from the illness.
From the start, suspicion fell upon Gina. Following Samaya’s death, detectives would find suspicious injuries on her and the rest of the surviving children, all of which would be attributed to Gina’s abuse. What the children would tell them would prove to be horrifying.
Dr. Emma Lew, the medical examiner who conducted Samaya’s autopsy before retiring, testified in court that she found injuries on the girl “from her face, down to her neck, down to her chest, abdomen, back, both arms, and both legs,” according to NBC Miami.
Lew concluded that Samaya died as a result of acute and chronic physical and emotional abuse.
In Jan. 2019, the surviving 12-year-old daughter spoke to police and revealed the terror her adoptive mother put her and her siblings through. By this point, the remaining kids had been removed from Gina’s custody. With the distance, the young girl spoke out about the abuse.
Gina, in the meantime, continued working as a home care nurse. She ran a group home for two people, NBC Miami reported.
Police arrested the registered nurse on Oct. 15, 2019. An arrest affidavit obtained by NBC Miami said Gina, who was 50 at the time, would “beat them (and the deceased victim) with belts, a brush, and a back scratcher for punishment, made them stand for hours at a time, tied their hands and bodies to furniture in the home when they were no longer able to stand, tied socks around their eyes, made them sleep on the floor when they wet the bed and burned their hands and fingers on the stove.”
The affidavit adds describes an incident where the girls awoke in the middle of the night, hungry. Gina locked up the food in the home, including a lock on the fridge. The girls ate the only thing that had access to: some bread that Gina had been saving for her biological son. When she discovered they had eaten it, she allegedly “held both victims hands down on the hot stove repeatedly until they were burned.”
As a result of not seeking medical care for the injuries, the girls’ hands were permanently disfigured from the burns.
According to the arrest affidavit, she was originally charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse causing great bodily harm and child neglect causing great bodily harm.
At a bond hearing, the prosecution told the judge that they wanted Gina held on a significant bond.
“The facts of this case are sickening. It’s hard to imagine the pain and suffering these children endured at the hands of this defendant,” a prosecutor said.
Prosecutors allege that what should have been a home for the kids she adopted turned into a house of terror. Gina adopted the three kids, aged 6, 7, and 12, as well as their 4-year-old brother, in 2017 after she began fostering them in 2014.
The defense maintained that Gina had no previous criminal record and was a registered nurse. Nonetheless, a judge ruled for her to be held on a $120,000 bond while she awaited trial.
“Ma’am let me make this perfectly clear to you — you are to have absolutely no contact whatsoever with your two children,” the judge told Gina during that hearing, according to CBS.
In Nov. 2019, the State’s Department of Health issued an emergency order to strip Gina of her nursing license in light of the charges against her.
The Agency for Persons with Disabilities, which regulated the group home, filed an administrative complaint and scheduled a hearing with the goal of having Gina lose her ability to run group homes.
The trial wouldn’t start until April 2025. Gina, now 56, faced what the world now knew of the abuse she allegedly inflicted on the children she adopted and should have loved.
“You will learn through this trial about the defendant’s control,” the prosecutor began.
“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.”
“The defendant would make them stand on one leg for hours. You will hear how the defendant taped Samaya to a chair until her body could no longer stand,” a prosecutor explained during opening statements, as per an NBC Miami report.
The prosecution described the death as inevitable given Gina’s heinous behavior.
“What else was gonna happen as a result of the choices she made?” they asked.
The defense chose to minimize the accusations in their statements.
“When the children didn’t do their school work, didn’t do their homework or didn’t do their chores, yes, there was discipline. There was discipline in the home and yes, there was some punishment but it was reasonable corporal punishment that is permitted by law, not child abuse,” a defense attorney claimed.
Gina’s defense team added that the abuse wasn’t her fault completely, according to Local 10, and claimed that she didn’t know how sick her daughter truly was.
“Should she have taken the child to the hospital? Yes, absolutely, but it wasn’t murder. It was not child abuse,” the defense attorney said.
In March, the prosecution offered Gina a plea deal that would have seen her go to prison for 25 years, Local 10 notes, but she rejected that, opting to gamble on a trial for first-degree murder which would result in a life sentence if convicted.
The trial lasted for three days and saw testimony from the surviving daughter who first spoke to police. She is now 18, and courageously shared her story on the stand.
“She would chain us, she would have us lay down, she would chain us and lock until she got back,” she told the court.
But the defense would come back and claim that Samaya had died from untreated diabetes and her illness, not from child abuse, NBC Miami reports.
Gina didn’t testify in her own defense.
After closing arguments, jurors moved to deliberate on Gina’s fate. On April 15, 2025, they reached a verdict: they found her guilty on one charge of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated child abuse causing great bodily harm. The jury deliberated for only one hour.
Law & Crime notes that her sentence hearing is on April 30, 2025.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle put out a statement regarding the conviction of Gina Emmanuel:
“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. No one could ever imagine that a trained nurse would beat, torture, and starve Samaya and her 2 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,” Rundle said.
“One should admire the courage it took for Samaya’s sister, 12-years-old at the time of the abuse, to come forward and testify in court, before judges, lawyers, jurors, and others in order for the truth to be told,” she continued. “The prosecution team of Assistant State Attorneys Cristina Diamond and Kristen Rodriguez deserve congratulations for performing a superb job of bringing all the distressing evidence and testimony to the attention of the court and the jury.”
Fatal Maternity (Part 5): Child Maltreatment
This series started with filicidal mothers who lost themselves to mental illness. Who, in the chaotic midst of a psychotic episode or mental breakdown, killed her children, only to regret it in the aftermath. Women who were good, devoted mothers who thought they were doing what was best for the children, no matter how outlandish the reason.
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Sources
NBC Miami