A Baton Rouge judge sentenced the man convicted of packing an unresponsive 2-year-old’s body into a suitcase and burying the child in Mississippi to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Wednesday.
Phillip Kegan Gardner, 34, stood before 19th Judicial District Court Judge Fred Crifasi and asked that he deviate from the state-mandated life without parole sentence for murder. A jury found Gardner guilty of second-degree murder and obstruction of justice May 9 at the end of a two-week trial.
Gardner stuffed his live-in girlfriend’s daughter, Nevaeh Allen, in a suitcase after he found the girl unresponsive in the family’s apartment on the afternoon of Sept. 24, 2021, and couldn’t revive her. He drove the toddler across state lines and buried her body in a shallow grave along the banks of the Pearl River in Mississippi…