Former Georgia pageant queen Trinity Poague has been sentenced to life in prison after she fatally beat her boyfriend’s 18-month-old son in her college dorm room.
Poague received her sentencing during a court hearing on December 5 after she was found guilty of five counts, which include two counts of felony murder.
“I don’t do a lot of speaking when I’m passing the sentence,” Judge W. James Sizemore Jr. of the Southwestern Circuit Court of Georgia said in the video from the sentencing shared by Court TV. “The bottom line is you’re going to receive a sentence of life in prison, which is the appropriate sentence for the conduct that you have been convicted of.”
Additionally, Sizemore said that Poague was also being sentenced to serve 20 additional years concurrently.
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While Poague was relatively calm during her sentencing, the video showed that she was emotional throughout most of the hearing. She even broke down in tears at one point.
Poague was first arrested in January 2024, according to a Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) press release. GBI said the young victim, who was identified as Romeo Angeles, was found unresponsive on the Georgia Southwestern State University campus on January 14, 2024. According to WTVY 4, Poague was a student at the university at the time of the incident.
Sumter County authorities claimed Poague inflicted “blunt-force trauma to the head and torso” of the boy’s body, per an indictment previously reported by WALB and WDHN.
While recalling the day that Angeles, who was also known as Jaxton Dru, died, fellow student Lilly Waterman told WRDW that residents that lived in Poague’s dorm claimed they heard a child crying for a long time until “suddenly it just stopped.” Waterman added, “And no one knew what happened.”
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“This is all people are going to think about for GSW now,” Waterman said at the time. “Like for a tragedy… for like that to happen in a place that I have to walk by every morning to get to class; there’s not going to be anything to take that back.”
During the trial, prosecutors claimed that Poague resented the young boy because she wanted to have a child of her own with her then-boyfriend.
Poague was previously crowned Miss Donalsonville in Georgia in 2024. After she was charged in connection to the toddler’s death, her title was stripped from her, per Early Country News.
