Grandmother guilty of throwing toddler off skywalk

A Northern Virginia grandmother was convicted Thursday of first-degree murder for tossing her 2-year-old granddaughter from a sixth-level pedestrian bridge at the state's largest shopping mall.

Carmela dela Rosa, of Fairfax, claimed she did not know right from wrong when she threw Angelyn Ogdoc off the 45-foot-high skywalk at Tysons Corner Center. The family had been at the mall last November in the midst of the busy holiday shopping season.

Prosecutors said dela Rosa knew what she was doing. She was motivated by anger at her son-in-law for getting her daughter pregnant out of wedlock, prosecutors said. It got worse during the mall outing because the son-in-law called his wife on a cellphone, they said.

Jurors saw a videotaped confession in which dela Rosa told detectives that she saw Angelyn as a way to get back at the son-in-law, James Ogdoc.

Defense witnesses testified that dela Rosa was diagnosed with severe depression and tried to kill herself on several occasions in the months before the incident.

Public defender Dawn Butorac argued that dela Rosa was a different woman in her depressive episodes, withdrawn and "afraid of the world" to the point that she regularly refused to leave the house.

The trial moves to the sentencing phase, where the jury must decide on a prison term. She faces 20 years to life.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.