An Orange County woman has pled guilty to second-degree murder Wednesday after shooting her mother in the head in December of 2022.
Paula Lee Decoteau, who was 51 at the time of the shooting, killed her 75-year-old mother Cheryl Garner Medlin in an incident at Medlin’s residence on Spruce Pine Trail, near the border of Orange and Durham counties. Decoteau now faces a minimum sentence of 15-and-a-half years, with the maximum being life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Though Decoteau was initially charged with first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree kidnapping, two misdemeanor counts of assaulting a government official or employee and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, most of those charges were dropped in the plea deal. The first-degree murder charge was downgraded to second-degree murder after testimony revealed Decoteau had been heavily drinking at a bar with friends and possibly ingesting cocaine and methamphetamine before the incident at Medlin’s house. The charge of assault with a deadly weapon and one of the charges of assault on a government official were dropped in 2023…