Twin daughters with a six-year history of chronic cellphone abuse testified Thursday that their mother burned them with a hot iron after discovering barred phones in their possession.
Henrico County Circuit Judge Daniel T. Balfour rejected defense arguments that Berneatha Terrell was acting in the heat of passion when she burned both girls in October, and he concluded that the wounds were not so serious that they amounted to an aggravated assault.
Terrell, 40, was convicted of two charges of malicious wounding, each carrying up to 20 years in prison. She will be sentenced Sept. 28.
Terrell is a single mother of a son and the twin 16-year-olds, whose cellphone use prompted threats of felony charges, nearly drove the family to bankruptcy, forced shutdowns of utility services for unpaid bills, forced the girls into juvenile detention for violating court orders not to have the phones, and resulted in dozens of civil actions from bill collectors.
Terrell testified about a parent's nightmare that began in 2006, when the girls allegedly burned the family home. It continued for five years, with the twins using stolen credit cards to buy more than a dozen cellphones, each of them purchased after orders from Terrell and judges not to.
"It was lie after lie after lie," defense lawyer Craig Cooley argued, describing the calculated, blatant history of purchases, hundreds of pages of bills, and a family dynamic that saw the girls' grandmother supporting the twins even as her own home went into foreclosure because of bills the girls thrust on her.
Accomplished scholars and members of the boys varsity football team at their high school, the twins, dressed in matching outfits, barely could be heard on the stand Thursday and said only that their mother had burned them with an iron, not specifically how the assaults took place.
The incidents, separated by 10 days in October, occurred after a blowup when Terrell again found that the girls had come up with new phones, even after juvenile probation officials warned them that prison could await them for violating court orders.
Terrell described a frantic night in which she forced the girls to strip naked "like in prison" and demanded that they reveal the location of their phones. She said she lost control, throwing items at the girls, including the iron, glassware and chafing dishes.
A friend of the twins' visiting that night testified that she heard Terrell threaten to use the iron and heard it hissing; the girls complained of pain afterward, she said.
But the incident was revealed to police months later, in January, when a tip led to an investigation and the girls described what had happened. Their testimony Thursday was virtually devoid of details about the attack and punctuated with memory lapses.
Terrell remained free on bond pending sentencing. The twins are living with other family.
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