Before a judge sentenced her to prison Friday, the woman convicted of fatally dragging toddler Elijah Cozart beneath her truck last year in Towson finally spoke to the boy?s family.
“I want to go to the child?s grave to ask for forgiveness on my knees and to bring flowers,” Lazara Arellano de Hogue, 41, said through a translator in Baltimore County Circuit Court. “… I ask God why did you kill him instead of me? I wish 1,000 times I died instead of him.”
Judge John Hennegan said he didn?t believe Arellano de Hogue was a bad person, but couldn?t get past one fact: Why didn?t the Mexican immigrant stop after hitting Elijah, whose grandmother Marjorie Thomas was pushing him in a stroller across a busy Towson intersection on Dec. 1, 2006? Why did she continue to drag the child for nearly a mile?
“The family wonders how she can do what she did,” Hennegan said, before imposing a 10-year sentence for vehicular manslaughter. “I wonder the same thing.”
Arellano de Hogue?s attorney, Ricardo Zwaig, said the tears his client showed in court were not unusual — though they were the first Elijah?s family had seen.
“Every time I see her in jail, she cries,” Zwaig said. “I have never seen her laugh.”
He said the judge?s sentence to Maryland?s prison system could endanger Arellano de Hogue?s life because of other inmates? anger toward her crime.
The sentence “may very well be a death sentence for her,” Zwaig said.
But Elijah?s family said their lives feel like death since the boy?s demise. Prosecutor Allan Webster said Elijah?s death was “torture.”
“I was not there for him to hold him in my arms when he was taking his last breath,” grandmother Marjorie Thomas, who broke two bones in the accident and cried for Elijah while lying the street, told the judge. “I cannot be happy knowing I will never see Elijah again.”
Elijah?s mother, Marsha Cozart, just broke down in tears when she addressed the court.
“Where was her motherly instinct when my mother was pushing my son in a stroller and a mother slammed into them and left them for dead?” she asked. “… He was killed and I felt like I was the one being buried. I was being buried alive.”
Her husband, Kevin, spoke last. “Every breath I take is a reminder that my son, Elijah, is not with me anymore. I pass the scene every day with the image of Elijah trapped underneath that truck.”
Outside the courthouse, Donna Cozart, Elijah?s aunt, said Arellano de Hogue, a devout Catholic, never apologized until after she was convicted.
As for her request to visit the child?s grave?
“We?re insulted,” Donna Cozart said. “All ofa sudden, she?s sorry?”
