Sentencing set in Carol Stream battery case
A Carol Stream stepmother faces four to 15 years in prison after a DuPage County judge declined her motion asking him to reconsider his verdict and grant her a new trial.
Andrea Vazquez-Hernandez, convicted in July of aggravated battery, domestic battery and the attempted aggravated battery of her 17-month-old stepdaughter, will be sentenced Sept. 15.
Handing down his ruling last month, Judge Brian Telander said he believed Vazquez-Hernandez knew mixing nail polish remover into the toddler's sippy cup could cause the child great bodily harm.
Prosecutors argued she tried to poison her stepdaughter after a dispute with her husband and the girl's mother in which she also threatened to kill her husband.
At the time of her arrest, Vazquez-Hernandez told police she thought the mixture would give the child diarrhea.
When the trial began in May, the girl's father, Robert Clark, testified that he took his 6-year-old son and the girl to get ice cream on May 29, 2016, after a particularly ugly dispute in which Vazquez-Hernandez threw her shoes and threatened to kill him.
After returning home, Clark testified, he retrieved the sippy cup his daughter had used throughout the day and gave it to her.
"She took a sip, spit it out and threw it on the floor," he testified on the trial's first day. "About 20 minutes later she pointed to the kitchen and I went and got her the bottle again and she did the exact same thing."
He testified he then took the girl to the hospital, where the drink was inspected and the girl was examined and released, uninjured. Vazquez-Hernandez has been held on $250,000 bail since her arrest.
According to the DuPage County sheriff department's website, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also has a hold on Vazquez-Hernandez.