TOTALLY GEEKED!

oyce Hardin Garrard, the Alabama woman serving a life sentence for punishing her 9-year-old granddaughter with a fatal running regimen, is dead.

Garrard, 50, who was brain dead after suffering a heart attack at the beginning of the week, died Friday, her son’s attorney told AL.com. She was convicted of murdering her granddaughter and subsequently sentenced to life in prison last year.

© AP Photo/Etowah County Sheriffs Office This undated photo, released by the Etowah County Sheriff’s Dept. in February 2012, shows Savannah Hardin.

“This is another loss for a family that already has lost so much,” Dani Bone, the attorney who defended Garrard at her trial last year, told the Associated Press.

Prosecutors cast Garrard as a heartless taskmaster who was bent on punishing Savannah Hardin one February Friday in 2012 for stealing candy from a peer and lying about it. Garrard argued that she was training Hardin for races, the AP reported at the time.

Chad and Jolie Jacobs lived across the road from Garrard at the time and testified at trial to what they witnessed over several hours on Feb. 17, 2012.

Chad Jacobs said that on at least four occasions over three hours he witnessed Garrard shouting at Hardin with the intonation of a “drill sergeant,” AL.com wrote at the time. At one point, he saw her carrying sticks to a burn pile.

Garrard’s punishment was harsh, but the Jacobs’s assumed Hardin was getting periodic breaks. The truth wouldn’t be made clear until they returned home at 6:30 p.m. that evening, they said:

By this time, the child was begging to stop. Jolie said she thought she heard “skin on skin” across the street, as though Joyce was striking the child.Savannah was vomiting. Still Joyce barked at her to carry the wood, even as she was crying.

By the time they decided to intervene, medics had arrived at the property.

Jessica Mae Hardin, who faces murder charges for failing to intervene, called 911 that evening to get help for her step-daughter. During that call, she made no mention of the run, noting only that Hardin was having a seizure, according to the AP. The dispatcher on that call testified that at one point Garrard could be heard in the background asking for “a smoke.”

In May, it took the jury of eight men and four women about as long as young Hardin had run that February day—three-and-a-half hours — to decide to convict Garrard of murder,AL.com reported.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/grandmother-who-punished-9-year-old-with-fatal-run-dies-in-prison/ar-BBpsIpt?li=BBnbfcL