20-Year Sentence in Va. Baby's Death

Michelle Leete dropped off her 21-month-old son at a day-care provider's home, then got a phone call four hours later saying he had been beaten to death.

The pain has scarcely subsided for the Fairfax County woman since that day in September 2006. She wept again in court yesterday as she recalled Myles Simon as a "jovial child who loved to smile and giggle and was a delight to his parents and grandparents."

After her testimony, a Fairfax Circuit Court judge sentenced Mohammad A. Ahmad to 20 years in prison as part of a plea bargain on a second-degree murder charge. The sentencing concluded a tortuous case that featured one murder trial, the erasure of its verdict, the dismissal of its prosecutors and the arrest of its main witness on perjury charges on the eve of the retrial.

In 2007, a jury convicted Ahmad, 26, of second-degree murder for inflicting multiple skull fractures and severe blunt force trauma to Myles's abdomen. Ahmad's wife, Jillian Ahmad, was the day-care provider, but she later admitted that she went to a friend's house seeking cocaine that morning, leaving her own daughter, Myles and Myles's sister, Sydney, in the care of her husband, who has a string of convictions dating to age 15.

As her husband was about to go to trial in 2007, Jillian Ahmad, now 24, vanished. The trial was postponed until the next month.

The night before the trial was to begin, Jillian Ahmad was found by Fairfax police and taken for an overnight jail stay as a material witness. As she was booked, an officer found a small amount of marijuana in her pocket. Rather than charge her, Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Kathryn S. Swart told the officer to throw it away.

But Swart did not disclose that information to Mohammad Ahmad's defense attorney, Robert Whitestone, who vigorously cross-examined Jillian Ahmad and later suggested that she might have killed the baby.

Well after the jury convicted Mohammad Ahmad and sentenced him to 40 years in prison, Jillian Ahmad revealed her marijuana possession to her husband's new attorneys. And last July, Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Leslie M. Alden ruled that Swart's failure to disclose that information, and her decision not to charge Jillian Ahmad, constituted grounds for a new trial. She threw out the murder conviction.

In November, Mohammad Ahmad's new attorneys, Peter D. Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro, noted that three of his previous lawyer's associates had joined the Fairfax prosecutor's office, creating a possible conflict of interest. Swart denied this, but Alden ordered the Fairfax office out of the case, and prosecutors from Stafford County were brought in.

About the same time, Jillian Ahmad claimed that she had been bribed by her husband's sister to stay away from the first murder trial. The sister was arrested on bribery charges, and Prince William County prosecutors were assigned to that case.

As Mohammad Ahmad's retrial neared, Jillian Ahmad last month phoned her now ex-husband in the Fairfax jail and demanded $6,000 for testimony that would help him and his sister. Mohammad Ahmad managed to forward the call to his attorneys' voice mail, where it was recorded. Confronted by Greenspun on the witness stand, Jillian Ahmad denied that she made the call. Last week, Fairfax police arrested her and charged her with perjury.

Stuck with a troubling key witness, the Stafford prosecutors offered him a deal: a plea to second-degree murder, but with a 20-year sentence rather than 40 years. Mohammad Ahmad accepted and made no statement while entering an Alford plea, which acknowledges that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him but does not admit guilt. The prosecutors also dropped the bribery charge against Ahmad's sister.

"There were risks of going to trial," Stafford Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Eric Olsen said. "And they all revolved around Jillian. . . . This was the death of an innocent at the hands of a violent man."

Leete, a technology project manager for the federal government, escaped from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, but she said the darkness of that day was transcended by her son's killing Sept. 12, 2006, and "the phone call that changed my life, and the way I would see the world forever."