A Schenectady mother has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after being convicted of murdering her infant daughter by abandoning her in freezing conditions.
On Monday (February 2), Judge Matthew Sypniewski handed down the maximum sentence to 24-year-old Persia Nelson for the March 2024 death of her daughter, Halo Branton, who was nearly 11 months old when she died.
Nelson was found guilty in October 2025 on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter, and endangering the welfare of a child after a jury trial that lasted more than two weeks. Prosecutors successfully argued that Nelson had acted with “depraved indifference to human life” when she placed her baby daughter inside a wet drainage pipe on General Electric’s Schenectady campus during cold weather…