A Bucks County woman is sentenced to jail for an infant’s death at her unlicensed day care

A Bucks County woman whose unlicensed day care was the site of a baby’s death in 2019 was sentenced Tuesday to up to two years in the county jail during an emotional hearing in Doylestown.

Lauren Landgrebe, 50, of Upper Southampton, had pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child in the death of 11-month-old Victoria Watson. The child asphyxiated after Landgrebe placed her in a car seat that was improperly secured.

In sentencing Landgrebe to jail, President Judge Wallace H. Bateman chastised her for leaving the the infant strapped into a car seat in the dining room of her home and leaving the room.

“She left a child in a car seat, like the centerpiece on a table, while she sunned herself by the pool,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine the callousness of that act.”

Bateman sentenced Landgrebe to one day less than a year to one day less than two years in jail, followed by 10 years’ probation — a term agreed upon by prosecutors and her defense attorney.

Landgrebe’s attorney, Louis Busico, said after the hearing that the sentence was “in the interest of justice.” Still, Busico said he recognized the pain of the Watson family’s loss.

“Undoubtedly, the criminal justice system isn’t properly equipped to make people whole,” he said.

Police were called to Landgrebe’s home in August 2019 for a report of an unresponsive infant. There, they found Victoria in the car seat, cold to the touch. She was later pronounced dead at Abington Hospital, where she had been born months earlier.

Landgrebe told detectives she placed the baby in the car seat and propped a bottle up next to her using a towel, something she had done many times before, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest. As the child slept, Landgrebe went outside with two other children she was watching, and checked back in on the baby only once.

» READ MORE: Bucks County woman charged in death of infant at unlicensed day care

She sent a photo of the child sleeping with the bottle next to her through Snapchat, joking to a friend that the girl had “a rough night.” Hours later, after her husband called the police because the baby had stopped breathing, Landgrebe deleted that picture, the affidavit said.

Victoria’s parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents took turns addressing Bateman during Tuesday’s hearing, each describing the joy she had brought them in her short life as well as the insurmountable grief they’ve had to wrestle with in the years since her death.

“We’ve all experienced tragic events in life,” Michael Watson, Victoria’s father, said. “This was 100% preventable, and that’s what makes this so tough. The person who should’ve gotten the most attention got the least.”

Watson called himself a shell of his former self, unable to trust people and struggling to find happiness in life.

His wife, Marita, said her life changed forever on the day her daughter died after being “left on a table as an afterthought.”

“My children suffer the most, because they don’t get the best versions of us,” she said, adding that she never imagined her daughter would become “a cautionary tale” for other parents to learn from.

“This could have been any child,” she said. “Unfortunately, it was our child, and we have to live with the result.”