Day Care Operator Gets 11 Years in Death of Tot : Courts: Mother criticizes the system and the criminal, who struck the 2-year-old after she wet herself.

A day care operator was sentenced to 11 years in state prison Tuesday for killing a 2-year-old girl in her care, but not until the victim’s mother chastised her and the criminal justice system.

Jacqueline Piper of National City, the 34-year-old owner of the Touch of Love nursery, pleaded guilty Aug. 20 to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Tiffany Murrell. Piper told investigators that she struck Tiffany in the abdomen April 27 out of frustration because the child had wet herself.

Pamela Murrell, the child’s mother, read a lengthy prepared statement to Superior Court Judge Charles R. Hayes as family members and friends in the packed gallery nodded and murmured in agreement.

“This woman is very evil and dangerous to society,” Murrell said.

Murrell called for Piper to spend the rest of her life in prison, even though the 11-year sentence had been negotiated in August.

“The maximum punishment would be for her to spend the rest of her life in a cell thinking about what she did,” Murrell said.

She criticized Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Madruga for allowing Piper to plead guilty to a lesser charge than murder.

“The way the prosecution handled the case was disrespectful to us,” she said.

She criticized Madruga for allowing Piper to plead guilty on a day Murrell and her husband were not attending court.

Madruga defended his actions, saying he took into account the possibility that a jury would not have found Piper guilty of anything. Madruga said that at most he would have been able to convince a jury that Piper was guilty of second-degree murder, a crime that carries a penalty of 15 years to life.

During his brief statement to the court, Madruga noted that even though Piper called 911 to report that the child was ill, she never told medical officials that the girl had been hit or had fallen--even after a nurse and another hospital worker asked her.

“Had the answers been truthful. . . . the doctors may have had a chance. . . . I think it’s cold and cruel that this woman denied her that chance,’ Madruga said.

Both Pamela Murrell and her husband, Leon, wore red ribbons on their chests during the sentencing hearing.

In his statement to the court, Leon Murrell said that “another child-killer is taken off the streets.”

“When you killed her, you took a part of me,” he said. “ . . . Now it’s your turn to have something taken from you.”