A young Henrico County woman will be allowed to recover from years of mental problems at home instead of in prison, a Henrico judge ruled yesterday.
Circuit Judge Gary A. Hicks sentenced 19-year-old Ebony Tucker to five years in prison but suspended enough of the sentence so that Tucker, convicted of the attempted abduction of an infant baby last year from a hospital, was able to go free.
The decision came after an emotional hearing in which Tucker's mother and psychologists spoke of the woman's post-traumatic stress syndrome and the emotional toll of deaths of friends and family.
Paulette Tucker broke into tears on the witness stand yesterday as she enumerated the deaths in her daughter's life and recalled the gradual deterioration that she mistook for typical teenage behavioral problems.
When Ebony Tucker was 14, she watched her sister die from a gunshot wound to the head. Two weeks later, her beloved stepfather was beaten to death and robbed. Then an uncle died in South Carolina.
Months later, the girl lost two favorite friends, bandmates at Highland Springs High School, to violence.
Tucker went from a joyful teenager who made straight A's, played in the band and was a member of the Beta club to a withdrawn, reclusive girl who slept on the couch rather than enter the bedroom she had shared with her murdered older sister, her mother testified.
Early last year, Ebony Tucker said she was pregnant. The family was puzzled but welcomed the news, even creating a nursery in their cramped apartment off Laburnum Avenue.
Then, in May, Tucker, 18, was stopped as she left Henrico Doctors' Hospital where she had aroused suspicion because of unwanted contacts she was making with a new mother.
Charges of attempted abduction of the woman's baby came later, after Tucker's identity was confirmed.
Psychologists who treated Tucker after her arrest said she suffered from psychotic episodes in which she imagined her dead sister talking with her; she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. It turned out that Tucker was not pregnant, nor were subsequent stories true that she had miscarried.
In November, she pleaded no contest to attempted abduction charges that carried from one to five years in prison.
Hicks suspended all but six months of a five-year sentence yesterday and ordered Tucker to continue therapy and medication treatments.
And because Tucker has already served a month in jail and had been under home arrest for months, she was free after being processed by court personnel.
Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.
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