Breaking News: Mother guilty of children’s slayings

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It took jurors just over an hour Thursday to find Amy Hebert guilty of stabbing her two children to death on Aug. 20, 2007.


Jurors returned two first-degree murder verdicts against the 42-year-old school paraprofessional for killing her daughter, Camille, 9, and son, Braxton, 7, that August morning.


The jury has retired for the day. Deliberation in the penalty phase is scheduled to begin tomorrow at 10 a.m., District Judge Jerome Barbera told a packed courtroom. The jury could sentence Hebert to the death penalty, making her the first person in Lafourche Parish to die in more than 30 years.

Hebert and her defense team showed no emotion when the penalty was read. After the jury left the courtroom, Hebert’s ex-husband and father of the two children, Chad Hebert, clutched his wife Kimberly in an emotional embrace.


The jury rejected the defense team’s theory that Hebert was psychotic at the time of the murders and that an imagined voice ordered the killings. Defense attorney George Parnham argued Hebert falsely believed that morning her ex-husband was going to take the children from her.


Lafourche Parish District Attorney Cam Morvant told jurors in closing arguments Wednesday that Hebert killed the children to punish Chad Hebert for divorcing her in 2005 and announcing plans in summer 2006 to remarry.

Morvant rejected the theory that Satan or God had directed Hebert’s actions the morning of the murders.


“That was her decision,” he told jurors. “Nobody made her do it. There wasn’t a voice there. That’s a rationalization after the fact.”

Hebert stabbed her daughter Camille over 30 times in the chest and back and an additional 30 times in the scalp. Braxton had approximately 50 stab wounds in his chest and back, according to a coroner’s report.

“The jury read the right verdict based on the evidence, and I am pleased with it,” Morvant said shortly after the decision was read Thursday.

Parnham refused to speak about the verdict, but did comment on Hebert’s emotional wellbeing. “Amy is doing as well as expected considering the circumstances.”

Leaving the courtroom Thursday, Lockport resident Rowena Adams, a cousin of Hebert’s former mother-in-law, said she wasn’t shocked by the verdict.

“We have been going through this for almost two years,” she said. “We have when waiting on her to be found guilty. Talking with the children’s grandmother, Judy Hebert, she said this has been hard on the family.”

Though Adams has a personal relationship with the Hebert family, the Lockport resident said she is also familiar with Hebert and her family. “I am not going to say she deserves the death penalty because I am not the judge or jury,” she said.

Amy Hebert